Mike Knudsen wrote:

> My educated guess is that it is not practical for a WAV player to have
> tempo control, since changing the tempo would also change the pitch,
> as with a tape or record.  WAV files are sound recordings, unlike MIDI
> files which are essentially digitized piano rolls.

There is nothing wrong with having the pitch change -- who did not
enjoy playing around with the speed control of an LP (record) player?

A WAV player with variable playback sample rate _is_ (or at least it
was) available, and much closer then you think!  Winamp used to do this;
no slider, though, but two certain keys (like "+" and "-" or so) could
speed it up or slow it down.

As you can see above, I'm not certain if this "feature" is still
implemented in Winamp, as it might have led the majority of users into
chaos, wondering about what happened to their music all of a sudden.
With the current version that I have, I was neither able to find the
right keys, nor was there documentation about it.

On the Amiga operating system I used to have "OctaMED".  This player
with the MP3 plug-in installed also was able to change speed by using
two trigger "hotkeys".

> You alluded to converting MIDI files directly into WAV, without
> going through a sound card or synthesizer. ...

Sounds interesting.  Even a normal on-board soundcard should be able to
do that, though, under the condition that you have a good sound studio
program such as "WaveLab" or the like.  I didn't try it yet, but with
the computer MIDI Volume as input it should be easy to create WAV files
and thus MP3s on-the-fly.

greetings by(e) InK - Ingmar Krause
Victoria, BC, Canada
Erlangen, BY, Germany