MiniBAE

MiniBAE is a mobile sample-based audio engine developed from 1991 to 2001, later succeeded by the MobileBAE engine. It's soundbanks are stored in a proprietary '.hsb' (Headspace Sound Bank) format.

The technology was first developed by Steve Hales in a video game porting company called Halestorm in 1991. At the time, it was called SoundMusicSys, appearing in many successful video games for Macintosh, and in Microsoft's 'WebTV' devices. Steve later ended up selling the technology to Beatnik. (called Headspace, Inc. at the time). Later, MiniBAE appeared in 1997 as a browser plugin used to play "RMF" (Rich Media Format) files, a direct precursor to MXMF files that used .hsb files instead of .dls. This format was invented as a way of storing music in a small size, so people with a dial-up connection could download it relatively quickly.

MiniBAE was also used in older Java versions (until JRE 7), and BeOS. Nokia started licensing MiniBAE in 1999, but did not begin using it until the Nokia 3510 and Nokia 7650. It was used on many Nokia phones between 2002 and 2009, although after 2004 it had been deprecated in favor of MobileBAE and was only being used on low end S40 phones at this point.

Danger's Hiptop/Sidekick devices also used miniBAE up until 2004-2005, when they switched to MobileBAE.

Since the shutdown of Beatnik in 2009, the source code has been released under a BSD license. Many bits of the code weren't released due to copyright issues, so it will take some skill to get the code to compile on Windows.

Links

 * BeatnikX Player