drobilla

Well, I’ve been working on Ardour but not directly on my SoC project.. finally got around to fixing that whole mixer-strip-element thing that’s been on the table since last year. Things are more open to extensibility now (and a unified bus implementation should appear soon, so we’ll have MIDI busses or even MIDI/audio (instrument) busses). Maybe we’ll see things like this actually happen some time soonish…

It would be nice to figure out a really good MIDI meter (something more clever than just an audio peak meter abused), and a MIDI fader that can work in various ways, or even instrument plugin support, but it’s probably time to get on the actual piano roll editing part of the project and leave that stuff until afterwards.

Kinda ruins my flow though, you know?

Well.. finally fully moved; I guess it’s time to stop screwing around and get back into hacking. Specifically Ardour, since I’m being payed to do so and all.

Looks like we don’t have a fancy new cairo canvas to play with. Maybe it will be worth my time to do that first, but I’m going to do some fiddling with displaying MIDI data with gnomecanvas first to get a grasp on things. Wouldn’t hurt to have some visually obvious clue that I am, in fact, actually doing something. This summer’s project should be more rewarding than last in that sense; most of what I need to do is visual stuff which tends to be more fun since you have something nice and tangible at the end of the day.

Of course, displaying data is one thing. One relatively easy thing. Actually editing it on the other hand………. that’s where the “fun” (ie hard) part comes in.

I think a top-down (GUI->implementation) strategy is best here. The Grand Battle Plan(TM) goes something like this:

• Get MIDI data displayed in regions, notes visible as one canvas item (rect) per note
• Attach event signals from note canvas items (move, click, etc) to a set of stub methods that encompass all the editing operations
• Now there’s a nice centralized area where all the editing operations need to be implemented
• Figure out how the hell to implement them (ie ???????????)
• Implement them (ie Profit!)