Hum. Only if you're considering *your* bandwidth and processor time, as compared to everyone else's who has to decode the information from the textual representation, surely? I include wetware processor time in this calculation.

This is where we came in. If there were something of roughly the order of Spectrum BASIC available on every damn machine in the modern computing world, then there'd be no wetware time involved at all. I'd post some BEEP commands, everyone who cared would cut and paste them into their nearest BASIC window, and the tune would immediately come out of their speakers.

It's precisely the fact that there simply doesn't seem to be anything nearly so convenient in modern operating systems which annoyed me. This post was mainly an effort to find out if there was anything obvious I'd missed. It appears not.