All Products for US Patent 6353172 - Music event timing and delivery in a non-realtime environment

Inventor(s): Fay; Todor C. (Bellevue, WA), Geist, Jr.; James F. (Kirkland, WA)

Owner: Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA)

Filing Date: February 2, 1999

Issue Date: March 5, 2002

Abstract: A music generation and playback system includes an application program and a music processing component. The application program makes repeated calls to the music processing component and provides a group of music events to be sent to the music processing component during each call. Each group of events comprises a plurality of individual events and associated timestamps indicating when the events are to be played. The timestamps of the individual music events of a particular group indicate that the events are to be played at varying times subsequent to being sent to the music processing component. The music processing component exposes a latency clock interface, which indicates the earliest time at which a new music event can be rendered. The application program uses this interface to determine how far ahead of time to provide new music events, and to schedule spontaneously occurring events for playback at the earliest possible time.