Re: [Denemo-devel] GSoC proposal to improve MIDI and audio capabilities

[Richard Shann]

On Thu, 2011-04-07 at 15:07 +0200, Dominic Sacré wrote:
> Hi Richard,
> 
> On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Richard Shann <address@hidden> wrote:
> > <das> well, i don't think my proposal would actually remove existing
> > features. at most it would (perhaps temporarily) disable some which are
> > more or less broken already
> >
> > Can you tell me which features you find are "more or less broken"? I
> > have a special -D compile option to get Denemo working on my Debian
> > Lenny installation, and I noticed the Denemo package that shipped with
> > Debian Sid gave no output at all.
> > I want to be sure that you are targetting a working version of Denemo in
> > your proposal.
> 
> I'm doing all my testing with a recent version from Git.
> I didn't mean to imply that Denemo is full of broken features, just
> that my proposal is mainly about restructuring and cleanup, not about
> removing things.
yes, I didn't take offence, I understood that, my question is would the
re-structuring you propose allow the adjustment of the MIDI timing
during feedback, as exemplified by the Tempo slider. That is if you
could describe the sequence of events that would happen when someone
moves the tempo slider during playback then I would be more confident
that we weren't getting ourselves into a trap. Well, that might be too
detailed for the gsoc proposal itself, but I think you need to show that
you are aware of the features that Denemo supports. Your proposal is
already the best in these terms - there are several applicants who give
the impression they have no idea what Denemo is beyond what they read in
the project description! But I don't think we can be complacent - there
seem to be a lot of projects getting proposals under the GNU umbrella
this year - last year we just sailed through. This year I have an uneasy
feeling that we will have to have a very good looking proposal or two
and, of course, favourable reviews.

> 
> > (There *are* broken features in Denemo - e.g. no-one has
> > used C-sound in a decade I suspect, but things often appear broken
> > because of poor documentation or o/s variations).
> 
> Yes, Csound playback is actually the best example for this. I don't
> know if it's broken per se, but it seems undocumented, unmaintained,
> and possibly unused. In fact I couldn't find out how to activate it in
> the GUI,
yes - you would have to get up the scheme command line!
>  or from where the Csound playback code is called.
> 
> It has also been suggested that audio input is only semi-usable 
I use it every week to tune my harpsichord. But I have not heard reports
of people using it for inputting notes to Denemo - it certainly still
does that - due to noises in the room I usually get a few notes inserted
before I hit the Tuning button - but it will surely have some bit rot by
now - it has lots of fancy pattern following features ... (I got a MIDI
keyboard a couple of years ago and have never looked back).

> and
> should not be a high priority. I'm not so sure about that, and would
> rather fix it than remove it, as it's a pretty nifty feature.
> Incidentally, I haven't been able to test it yet. At the moment all my
> usable hardware audio inputs are JACK-only (firewire), and audio input
> in Denemo only works with PortAudio. Did I mention I was planning to
> fix that? ;)
yes you did, and I only mentioned that if you needed to cut corners to
achieve the goal audio input could be left untouched, it would not break
anything and would not be broken if it was left untouched.

With best wishes

Richard