[sane-devel] What about creating music with scanning devices?

[Martin Langer]

Hi,

I've just had an idea about a crazy scanner frontend:

The basic idea is to use a scanner as music instrument and translate a scan
line into music notes (x-scale for differnt notes and intensity for the
volume). Therefore it would be nice to have a constant y value (I don't see an
interesting use for y!). So it would be great to read out that one y-line 
and produce MIDI notes until Ctrl-C is pressed. 

I'm more involved into the ALSA side of this problem and absolutely new to
sane development. So my question:

Is it possible to solve this (read out one line without y movement) in a 
frontend application? Or do I have to patch the backend part? Is there any
developer information available? I've just had a look to some command line
frontends, but they don't touch this point (ok, it's possible that I'm 
blind!). But my impression was: they only handle complete scans, which I don't 
want to use. Or is there a general problem in the control of scanning
devices, if I have this goal ..... because they were not build for this use.

Is there a counterpart to "sane_get_parameters()" for setting those
parameters, like lines and pixels? 

Anybody out there, who can give me some hints or who can say: "Forget It!"


thanks,
martin