Congratulations Bert for this nice project. I believe it has quite a potential
to be useful to the whole music community (both academic and industry) so I am
quite happy to contribute the following observations, not in any particular
order :
- Since you want to reach as many users as possible, ease of future porting
(to Windows in particular) should be a concern even if porting itself is not
part of your immediate project.
- Since you haven't started implementation yet, for an open source project I
suggest you use FLTK (Fast Light ToolKit, www.fltk.org) as a portable GUI
toolkit instead of Qt, as it is non-proprietary, free, open source, faster,
lighter, permanently feature-enriched by benevolous contributors around the
world like linux, and allows for opengl child windows so you have a very
powerful and universal 2D/3D graphics library at your disposal for drawing
purposes. Portability of FLTK : Unixes (including Linux) and Windows for the
moment. Mac in a few months. BeOS envisaged. Most importantly you may find
more people willing to contribute actively to your project with fltk than with
Qt for cost and license restrictions reasons.
- You need one library (librarian's database) per code-generating plugin :
this way you can have a saol plugin and e.g. a CSound plugin, each with its
own library of modules (UGs, macros, instruments and orchestras).
- It seems fair that an orchestra should only contain intruments and buses,
but you should allow the mixed use of both UGs and macros in lower-level structures.
- Pins should be labelled.
- Modules and pins should be "tooltipped" so the user knows what they do when
wandering his mouse over them.
- You need an input/output side convention (inputs on the left and outputs on
the right is the most standard, and makes most sense considering we read from
left to right and screens are generally wider than high)
- SML (synthesis modelling language) is a good idea (other thread)
- Now this is far-reaching, but maybe to make your tool even more universal
you could envisage to develop the main functionalities of QOrchestra itself as
a plugin (dynamic library, interface to be defined). This way a sequencer for
example could use it to graphically connect e.g. vst plugins together and be
warned of user input to take appropriate action (e.g. when warned by the QO
plugin that the graphical representation of a plugin is double-clicked,
display the plugin's panel), which a separate app communicating only via an
SML file couldn't do.
That's quite enough for now I guess but you did say you would appreciate
comments, don't blame me now ;-)
Bert Schiettecatte wrote:
>
> I would like to announce that a first software design for QOrchestra
> has been finished. You can get it at
>
> http://wendy.vub.ac.be/~bschiett/saol/
>
> I would grealy appreciate any comments (critics) on it. The software
> will probably undergo a few more weeks of design before implementation
> begins.
>
> ---
>
> About QOrchestra:
>
> QOrchestra is a visual authoring tool for SAOL. It will allow
> musicians and other users without programming experience to
> design a virtual orchestra setup (using 'virtual' instruments)
> which can then be compiled to SAOL code. This SAOL program can
> then be compiled to an MPEG-4 audio bitstream using existing
> tools like sfront and saolc.
>
> Thank you for your time,
>
> Bert Schiettecatte.
-- Greetings, Michel ......................................................................... Michel Jullian Directeur General email exbang@wanadoo.fr Exbang Industries S.A. Mas Chauvain route de Villeneuve tel +33(0) 499 529 878 Maurin 34970 Lattes France fax +33(0) 499 529 879 .........................................................................
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