Monday, February 25, 2008

Metronome project

The ViMic software I worked on will be used in a piece on March 4th. I will post some notes about the current state of the project and how it was used after this concert.

Besides ViMic, I have been working on a customizable polymetric metronome built using the STK for a few months now, as a personal project. After looking at several GUI toolkits, I have decided to develop the interface for this program using wxWidgets. Since I have only used QT before (and only a little at that), I was unsure for quite a while about which toolkit would work for my project. I was mainly looking for something that was easy to develop crossplatform, in "straightforward" (aka does not feel like I'm learning another language) C/C++. I was persuaded by a friend to try wxWidgets, and was more or less sold by Jeff Cogswell's wxWidgets tutorial. Also the free wxWidgets ebook didn't hurt either.

I won't say too much more about the metronome at this point, I want to keep the feature list short for the time being. A few important points:

  • It will be licensed under the GPL version 3.
  • It will have customizable ticking sounds (pitch, resonance, loudness, etc.).
  • It will allow for multiple metres at the same time.
  • It will be easy to use.

The last feature is really the most important, but out of habit the GPL notice always comes first. Besides, mentioning ease of use last makes it more memorable (for me at least) than if I had listed it second.

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