SuiteSound is one such environment. SuiteSound is built in the Suite object-based system on a conventional UNIX operating system. SuiteSound objects incorporate multimedia by creating flows and filters. Flows are streams of multimedia data moving through a sequence of objects. They bridge the gap between objects representing the state of an entity at a discrete point in time and space and continuous media such as live audio or video.
Filters are intermediate objects between the source and destination of a flow.
In effect, they provide a virtual device interface for the application programmer that is uniform and independent of any physical device. This paper describes the design and implementation of SuiteSound on the Sun SparcStation. We perform experiments to determine the network and CPU load of the sound tool, detail experiences using the SuiteSound environment and applications, and suggest future work.