I’ve had another stab at getting Jokosher running on the Nokia n900 and I’m getting much closer to something actually usable now, as this screenshot attests:
There’s still a number of issues that need resolving before it’s really ready for use (most notably some playback/recording problems and some dialog boxes that are too large for the screen), but it’s getting there. When it’s working fully it could make the n900 a very useful device for portable podcasting, allowing users to record, edit, mix, encode and upload their roaming shows with nothing more than their phone.
Andi is looking into making it possible to do collaborative editing tasks between multiple Jokosher instances, between Jokosher and Pitivi and potentially between Jokosher and a small remote control (so you can use your phone/MID to start Jokosher recording/playing without needing to be sat at your PC). The project is progressing well with some Jokosher information and events already being exposed via a dbus interface.
PÄ“teris is working on finishing up some old work to provide telepathy support within Jokosher and then further extending this to add support for telepathy tubes. This will make it very easy for users to record VoIP sessions within Jokosher and the tubes support will also tie-in with the collaborative editing project, allowing Andi to send dbus messages via telepathy connections to remote users. The most interesting use case from my perspective is for podcasters working over VoIP, in the scenario where both participants are using Jokosher it should be possible for them to carry out a standard VoIP call and then afterwards have the two Jokosher instances automatically synchronise a high quality recording of each participant’s side of the conversation; so while the VoIP call quality might not be perfect the final audio will sound as if they’re both in a studio together.
David is attempting to add musical score editing support to Jokosher, allowing people to sketch out musical ideas that can be played back as MIDI instruments alongside normal recorded audio. He’s already made some good progress in creating a python GStreamer element that can output some simple MusicXML based on an internal model (which can then be rendered to MIDI via the musicxml2midi element), this will then later be connected to a score editing UI, with the potential for multiple interface types (traditional scores, guitar tablature, drum events, etc.).
So hopefully by the end of the summer we’ll not only have a number of very exciting new features but also three more core Jokosher developers :).
A few months back I started writing a GStreamer element for converting MusicXML into MIDI, the eventual goal of this from my perspective is to allow for score editing inside Jokosher (without Jokosher having to deal with all the pain of the MIDI format itself). It’s far from being perfect and still has trouble with more complicated files, but hopefully it’ll be of use to some people in its current state so I’m releasing version 0.1.
All the source code is stored in a git repository: http://github.com/Elleo/gst-musicxml2midi. If you’d like to help out simply clone the repository and start hacking away, once you’re happy with your changes you can propose your branch for merging with my own.
Just for a bit of fun I thought I’d see how well Jokosher runs on the Neo FreeRunner mobile phone. It actually seems to be almost usable, I might see about finally looking at bug #228035 (making Jokosher more usable on small screen devices) to make it a bit easier to use.
Once some of the other more important tasks are completed I might also go back and take a look at implementing the Jokosher remote that we’ve had planned for a few years.
I’ve just about finished rewriting the crash protection code for Jokosher. It now supports recovering multiple crashed projects at any time after the fact (instead of forcing you to choose immediately after a crash has occurred). It also checks that the crashed project hasn’t changed since the backup was saved and makes sure the user really wants to restore the project if this is the case.
Jokosher has recently moved to using bazaar instead of SVN, as such this feature has it’s own branch, we’ll still need to see if this branch gets merged before or after the 0.10 release.
I’ve just finished adding a new feature for the 0.10 release of Jokosher (scheduled for August). Jokosher can now recover a user’s project after a crash:
It still needs some testing, but it seems to work acceptably well at the moment and doesn’t appear to cause any problems with editing while backups are being saved.
Also, thanks to the great work of Sebastian Dröge fixing bugs in the GStreamer audioconvert and deinterleave plugins, when I get home in a couple of weeks I’ll be able to finish the work we started over a year ago on getting support for multiple simultaneous inputs in to Jokosher.
Now that I’ve got most of the libempathy and libempathy-gtk functions I need working as python bindings I’ve finally been able to get on with some fun hacking on Jokosher itself. A user’s contacts (managed by Telepathy’s Mission Control) are now offered as possible instruments which can be added to a project:
Next I’ll see about fixing some problems with the python bindings so that the avatar pixbuf generation works correctly, rather than just assigning everyone with a generic avatar.
With all the excitement streaming from Jono and Aq on the subject of things to do with the Nokia 770 that was kindly donated to the Jokosher project at GUADEC, I thought I’d have a play around with the Maemo SDK (Maemo is the platform upon which the Nokia 770 operates).
After a little bit of fiddling I managed to get Jokosher up and running:
It’s not really in a usable state, I had to strip out all the Cairo stuff due to me not having the python cairo bindings installed, but at least it roughly runs :).
