Jim,
Will the Aquarium ever have support for external additions such as sounds in WAV format? If not, then we know what our boundaries are and what the size of the sound canvas is.
If extensability of the sound happens through external WAV file support, then we have
many options to extend the sound...
In all cases, the present bubbles (60kb 22 KHz 16 bit?) would continue to be stored internally as the default (or whatever other 60kb sound you might settle on as you receive submissions).
Then externally, we can have external WAV files with a few Serenescreen sponsored loops and then any other sounds people end up creating. This would also allow us to produce high-end sounds including a 44 KHz 16-bit Stereo loop with Dolby Pro Logic surround sound encoding.
If we do not get extensability in the Aquarium for an external WAV, you could still...
Store the present bubbles (60kb 22 KHz 16 bit?) internally as the default sound and also store a longer mp3-encoded WAV file (60-100kb 44 KHz 16-bit) that can be optionally turned on depending on the speed of the user's computer.
We don't need to know the answer to this immediately to start submitting sounds but we'd like to know eventually.
And if you add support for a program being launched externally when the Aquarium launches, then that opens it up to all of the above plus the possibility of Dolby 5.1 recorded sound being triggered without any further effort on your part.
Don't overestimate user's ability to, and interest in, plugins and extensions to software. People find ways to enhance software that was never designed to be enhanced
Next week, I'll ask whether loadable BMP files with an 8-bit alpha map (so you have enough information in the BMP to build a 3D coral shadow mesh with) will be coming