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Building CONCERT Instruments

The development of components for distributed education sessions has to solve the following issues:

1. Interaction between leading instrument and its followers,
2. Changing the leading instrument of an ensemble,
3. Switching execution mode of an instrument ensemble to independent and back,
4. Integration of external applications.

The basic problems of the first three items and solution strategies have been described in Concert Services. Instruments directly implemented as Java classes of a concert score can rely on the high-level concepts of

• beat sequences for synchronization,
• access to a global database for communication

or utilize low-level protocol classes for special purposes (broadcasting of real-time audio frames from the leading instrument to followers). While the technical details may be demanding (questions of quality of service), the essential concepts are clear. Thus we now concentrate on the last items i.e. the integration of existing application programs as instruments and its relation to the issues listed above.