Michael Sheldon's Development Stuff

As part of the Jokosher hackfest, which is happening as I write, I’ve finally sat down and mostly sorted out the channel splitting element. We need this element for handling multiple simultanious inputs from a single sound card due to them coming in as a single multi-channel stream and us needing lots of single channel streams. An example of its usage would be roughly along these lines:

                  |-- chansplit channel=0 -- etc -- filesink location=0.flac
                  |-- chansplit channel=1 -- etc -- filesink location=1.flac
alsasrc -- tee -- |
                  |-- chansplit channel=2 -- etc -- filesink location=2.flac
                  |-- chansplit channel=3 -- etc -- filesink location=3.flac

It’s not quite perfect yet, it should really output a stream with a single channel instead of just moving the selected channel to position 0 and silencing the others, but it’s usable. I’ve created a package for Ubuntu Dapper (should work on Debian unstable as well): gstreamer0.10-chansplit_0.10.1-0_i386.deb and the source is available from the Jokosher subversion repositories.

In related news, ensonic has just fixed a bug in GStreamer which was preventing playing a project multiple times in Jokosher, which is great :).

Thought I’d give another little update on what I’ve been doing on Jokosher. Over the past couple of days I’ve added support for Gnonlin based mixed playback, event based recording, displaying of recorded events and (buggy) exporting. After the export bug and a problem with start/duration settings for events are sorted it’ll actually be vaguely usable, though still rough around the edges and lacking a lot of features. The rest of the team have been doing amazing things with the GUI, making it look and feel really nice, as well as getting saving and loading working pretty well.

Latest screenshot:

I noticed a lack of any software that deals with mouse movement smoothing for people suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, Essential Tremour, and similiar conditions that works under X. There already exists some software called SteadyMouse for Windows, and IBM make a hardware adapter.

So I decided to have a go at writing something. It’s only had a few hours work on it so far. It implements some simple low pass filtering to try and remove shakes and isn’t especially good at the moment (in fact it might even make things worse :P) but it’s a start. I probably won’t do much more on it until Easter when I’ll have a computer with an actual mouse instead of a trackpad to experiment with but the current code is available in my bazaar repository.

Here’s a screenshot:

(Notice the cute hamster systray icon ;).)

Alasdair has been doing a great job keeping the Jokosher website updated with the latest progress, but I thought I would write a little post here since it beats actually working.

We’re now well on the way to getting everything ported to GStreamer 0.10 (from 0.8), which already shows noticeable speed improvements (the interface is now much more responsive when recording).

I’ve written some HAL/DBUS code to automatically detect what sound cards are available and allow the user to select them in the preferences dialog (although this selection isn’t yet used, I’ll have that done fairly shortly).

Ben Thorpe has started hacking on things a fair amount, adding selection and deletion code as well as fixing some irritating bugs.

Alasdair has been redesigning the website slightly, creating a new image for the header.

A few new people have expressed an interest in helping out, no doubt lured by Jono’s fame as the rest of us poor souls were ;).

We now have a tentative release date for 0.1 sketched in as the 22nd of July, to coincide with LUGRadio Live ’06, at which Jono ambitiously hopes to be able to record the show’s audio using it (plus we can hijack lots of people for a release party ;)).

Finally, a screenshot, made all the more pretty by Dan & Greg’s icons.

Thanks to Jono I now have a flashy Delta 44 sound card, which can handle multiple simultanious inputs. This particular card has the distinct priviledge of having recorded 43 episodes of the ever popular LUGRadio and will now live out its retirement providing me with a suitable card to write the simultanious input code for Jokosher on (and perhaps recording odd stuff of my own).

My latest distraction is working on Jokosher (formerly JonoEdit). It’s a multi-track non-linear audio editor with a prime focus on usability. So far I’ve managed to get single-track recording working, and almost have mixed multi-track playback working. Jono‘s been hacking away on the interface while Micro and Jason have started working together on producing a Cairo based widget for displaying a graphical representation of the audio. Pretty much any assistance would be appreciated so anyone wanting to help would do well to check out the Getting Involved page.

With a little luck I’ll have a multi-input sound card pretty soon, which’ll enable me to start work on the simultanious multi-input recording features.

Finally, a screenshot:

After vague prodding from Jono and Trig I’ve hacked together a little phpBB theme to make the LUGRadio forums more consistent with the rest of the site. The latest version can be seen at http://mikeasoft.com/phpbb, which’ll hopefully get applied to the official forums in the near future (pending any requested improvements).

From the classified adverts section of the February 16th edition of Micro Mart (issue 889):

I’ve made a quick flash video showing off the STX LiveCD Installer in action :). It can be viewed at: http://junk.mikeasoft.com/stxinstall.htm

I’ve just completed a successful install with the new STX LiveCD Installer :). There are still a few things to tidy up and odd bits to add on, but it essentially works now. I’ll be pretty busy for the next week (finishing group work, visiting parents and preparing for an interview) so I’ll try and get a testable version all ready in a couple of weeks, hopefully in time for stibs’ next beta LiveCD.