The Recursive ISV

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It’s day 16, well actually it’s past midnight here so it was day 16  ;-)  ,and I’ve been plodding away all day, quite happily.

The Dynamics Controller, basically another name for a compressor that includes limiting to prevent “clipping” (distortion) through over driving is now fully coded and working.  So the Equalizer and Dynamics Controller are all setup. 

The Dynamics Controller is not a cure for stupidity of course, it’s there for minor goofs in output levels and helps keep the peaks down a bit, especially sub-harmonics, which are the most damaging speaker wise in live Audio.

A few basic presets enabled, the remainder I’ll add later as presets require a bit of experimentation (translating decibel and frequency theory into floating points and integers actually).

I’ve added the UI for the “script”.  This is basically an embedded container, similar to the EQ and Compressor above, except it holds the actual script for what’s going on on the stage or Theatrical production.  “What the actors are saying/doing”, cues, timings and anything else one needs to know to keep ones place in the action. 

Like the above this is toggled on and off so that it can appear and disappear as the user wishes and is embedded so it’s not getting in the way of everything else.

That took a good portion of what was a short day, I had some other things I had to take care of and I admit my concentration wasn’t what it should have been today.  But then I’ve not had a day off since week last Saturday so I think I’ve earned some slack time. 

We have an icon. 

I got some quotes last week from various places, some cheap, some reasonable and some over the top.  The one I chose offered me a vector image that matched one of my proposed designs.  The price was right, the quality I think pretty good and the design appropriate to the application.  A vector image means I have to generate the icons myself, which is fine as I have the tools to do that.

I was tossing up between the classic Theatrical masks and the suggestion Mike Wilson, another 30 Day participant, made in a comment here that I consider stage curtains.  Now, I have a competitor on the Mac who uses stage curtains for his icon.  But what the heck - in the end I went for the red stage curtain design as it sits well on Win2K to Vista which higher resolution images often don’t.  So my thanks to Mike for making the suggestion.

MixAction icon:

Note - the resolution blurred by me and the “Sample” text added for the purposes of display on this blog and in so doing I’ve mangled the edges, entirely intentionally for rather obvious reasons. 

So relevance of the icon seems to be solved.

I’ve also been revisiting my web site design ideas for the application. 

I’m now mulling over whether or not I will actually go with Joomla.  I love the Joomla package and all it offers, I have a template, but when you strip away the not needed extra glitzy mootools cool stuff on the front page you’re basically left with nothing very exciting. 

The problem is finding a Joomla template that fits what I’m doing here.  I don’t mind buying in graphics for it, but CSS coder I am not.  So I’m looking around and am actually considering a standard HTML site if I have to do so, though the issue here is missing out on the ease of adding articles for SEO purposes that makes Joomla so appealing to me. 

Basically I want a “Web 2.0″ look.  I have that, but as I said above, strip the bells and whistles I don’t need away and thinks become bland and unrecognizable.  A shame because the templates I’ve purchased are stunningly beautiful with those bells and whistles.

Tomorrow’s work is getting to the track properties so that the user can butcher our carefully extracted Audio file meta tags into something more meaningful for their production.

From this leads us to the implementation of the other special effects such as:

• Chorus 
• Compression
• Distortion
• Echo
• Environmental reverberation
• Flange
• Gargle
• Parametric equalizer
• Reverse
• Plus a few I’ve made up myself that combine the above like chipmunks and mega baritones.

After that we have the track timing where user can edit when a track starts and ends, whether it fades in or out, whether another track starts after it fades or finishes or said track fades in over it.

I’m hoping to add triggering which will allow for effects to fire on and off in sections of a track instead of all the way through, but that will depend on time constraints in respect of getting the first release out.

After that we tighten the code, polish off any miscellaneous bits and pieces, make sure the help file is up to date with all changes that have been made and….

Later…

Quote of the Day:
When all else fails, read the instructions.
–Cahn’s Axiom
also known as RTFM (Read The F’in Manual)

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