[CM] snd: control-panel blocks playback

[andersvi at notam02.no]

    B> I was too embarrassed about it to say anything... (sleepy coder,
    B> yowling cats, gtk...)

A short little story (for the cmdist archives), about a young musicology
student back in 1992, drawn into the confusing combination of lisp and
dsp mantras, square-eyed trying to make sense of what someone called the
debugger output (more like assembler code) coming from some linked-in
56k-code, wondering where it all went wrong: finally, after daring to
push C-Alt-x, a long nights wait (12 hrs or more) for the nextstation
(turbo!) to compute a 2 minute (stereo!) soundfile, and finally some
sound to play!  Only silence coming out..  Many attempts during the
weeks all ended in vain.  I was surely misunderstanding something very
basic, but noone around to help...

This was in 1992, before altavista and all that, but we had ftp and
email (and archie!).  The README file suggested to contact the
programmer himself - bil at ccrma...  What! the guy who wrote those
articles about counterpoint and things?  Nope, he's surely got better
things to do.

Finally i got a clumsy email sent along, describing the troubles as far
as possible.  After 1 or 2 hours a reply came back from .edu, starting
with (the now familiar) "thanks for the bug-report!", and a notice to
get a fresh tarball from ccrma.  What!?  - he's suggesting its the
programs fault, not mine!  You all can guess the rest: next morning,
after the Next had spun for another night, sound came out as expected.

After that, the idea of closed-source and special support-deals as
something good seemed strange, as it indeed still does.

Thanks again!

-anders