Chris McElroy

Interface changes… again

Chris — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 04:05:49 +0000

So I have my project working and its been quite fun playing around on it and seeing how people are interacting with it. After today’s presentation, I met up with a Graphic Designer from Sedso Design (who was going to be my guest for today’s last minute presentation), and we came up with a few more ideas for the remix portion interface. I’m planning on sticking with the button concept and am going to include the album artwork and band info at the bottom of the remix screen, and also move the “Choose a different song” / back button to be located with the album artwork, while pushing the “Create Visuals” button over to the left. The remix buttons themselves are going to have a rollover state that will trigger the sounds, but will now shut off if you hover over another instance of the guitar track if you were already hearing it (so that the 2 sounds don’t overlap). If you rollover the vocal button, the guitar you were already on will continue to play so that you can still hear what the 2 would sound like together. I’m interested in hearing whether people would like that (it is fun to play around with that way), or if I should just have all sounds stop when hovering over any different track. I’m going to change the look of the buttons, and might include silhouettes of a guitar, microphone, bass, drum set, and piano keys rather than the current square buttons. For the song selection screen, I have the code mentally figured out for how to transition between selecting the different songs and how to trigger it to jump to that bands’ remix and visualizer screen (its actually quite simpler and easier to implement then the original idea I was thinking about doing). I was thinking of instead of having a “Preview song” button grouped with the website links, is that the song that is currently selected would fade in and out when going through the different tracks (one less click for the user). There’s a bunch of work left for me to do, but I have most of it figured out and all it takes is the time to do the coding. Can’t wait to have a final version to show everyone!

98% there!

Chris — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 01:40:35 +0000

I figured out a fix for the photo portion of the visualization screen. instead of dragging and dropping the thumbnails for each photo, you can click on the thumbnail and the larger photo appears as a movieclip which you can then drag and drop on stage. this makes the photo selection behave more like background and visualizer selections. For the visualizers, I have them set to appear at predetermined x, y coordinates rather than the user selecting where on screen they appear. I’ll want to show this to a few people to get feedback on which way to go about this.

for the remix screen, I FINALLY have something figured out. There has been so many problems I was running into with getting Flash (especially with actionscript 2.0, its easier to accomplish this with 3.0) to handle loading and playing multiple sound files. What I ended up doing is creating external swf files (such as nin_guitar_1.swf) which is a blank file with only the particular sound file added to the first frame. When you click a button, it tells the guitar variable to load nin_guitar_1.swf, and the main button calls up what is defined for guitar and then loads it. The only problem I’m running into with this is that it currently only works if I have it in the very same frame, where as now I have each selection as a frame in a movie clip. the problem lies with calling the variable from inside a separate movie clip. I know I could get this working if I had stuck with my original interface buttons rather than dealing with extra movie clips, but I’m hoping to figure this out so that I can use the easier controls.

after this stuff gets straightened away, all that will be left is adding additional photos and visualizers, adding the remaining remixed tracks (should only take about 1 day for each song), and adding in the additional songs (still shooting to have 5 included, I’ll keep adding 1 a day after completing everything else until the senior show).

Busy busy busy…

Chris — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 23:49:15 +0000

Thursday night I ended up seeing Umphrey’s McGee in Delaware. I talked with their sound engineer Kevin Browning during set break and discussed what I need from him to remix. We ran into a problem where he has all of the original audio tracks from the album on his hard drive in Chicago, and he won’t be back there until after the project is due. He said he can most likely send me a 2 or 3 minute version of one of the songs, so hopefully that works out, otherwise I’ll end up including Jane’s Addiction in the project and possibly more than 1 nine inch nails song. I also got to meet Umphrey’s McGee themselves after the show and I told them all about the project and how it was coming along. They all really liked the idea and said they can’t wait to see it when its done.

In other news, I’ve got the visualization screen about 95% done. the backgrounds look awesome now and I even included a slider for selecting the backgrounds. The photos and visualizers are coming along, but I would like to incorporate the same slider for those thumbnails. The only problem I’m having is for dragging and dropping the photos which is causing a few bugs (the audio adds another version of the song playing on top of the already playing audio file, the thumbnail stays stuck to the mouse cursor, or the image just keeps adding itself over and over). I might switch it so that the image will just appear on screen, and then you can drag it around from there, rather than becoming attached to the mouse cursor.

For the remixing screen, I’ve changed the interface so that you just have 2 buttons for each instrument choice and it looks much nicer now. I’m running into a lot of problems with playing multiple audio files and there aren’t enough good resources on the internet to help me out. I’m thinking about starting from scratch to figure out solution but hope to have something figured out by later tonight. That’s pretty much my last main hurdle with the project, and after I get it working then all I really have to do is fine tune everything. I would post screenshots, but I’m a bit busy and have to get back to coding…. fun times.

Updated Interface

Chris — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 01:30:06 +0000

Below is a new approach to navigating between menus, as well as showing the backgrounds in place. I’d write more about the changes, but I’ve gotta get back to coding all of this:

Bonus content

Chris — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 23:13:18 +0000

Wanted to mention that since this Flash application is going to be a pretty big file and have fairly substantial load times (unless I set it up to stream the audio rather than pre-load, but that can run into possible synching problems), I was thinking of possibly tying this project in as bonus content on a disc or else unlock a website (similar to what Push Entertainment is doing), where it would be remixing songs only for one band (presumably using the songs from the album that the fan has purchased). The visualizer would obviously be included, but I’d like to have it setup so that the fan could either use the remix tool or else just listen to the album version of songs and still play around with the visualizer if they want.

New songs to remix

Chris — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 22:41:24 +0000

Just got word from Umphrey’s McGee that they’ll probably be getting me the instrument tracks at some point this week so that I can get the tracks and remixes up on the website. I already have all the files I need from Nine Inch Nails, but Trent just posted multi-track files for Jane’s Addiction and Street Sweeper (Tom Morello’s new side project) to be remixed. I’m going to inquire with them about possibly including those bands on the project too if enough time allows after finishing up the NIN and Umphrey’s remixes and visuals.

Spring Break updates

Chris — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:35:18 +0000

I haven’t posted much to the blog over spring break, but I have made a lot more progress on the project. The new interface has been tweaked a bit more from the previous screenshots that have been posted, and I have all of the artwork integrated and animated in Flash. The 2 main things that I am focusing on this week (and probably into next week) is fixing the button behavior of the remix screen, and to continue programing all of the visual controls and menus. Everything is pretty much set in stone for how it will function, and I’ve shown a few people the working version for feedback on how easy or difficult it is to use. I’ve also been working a lot on my jury packet, which if you’re interested, you can check it out here.

New Interface Screenshots

Chris — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 03:05:03 +0000

I’ve been working on this new interface for the past week, then met up with Tom Foley at Sedso Design tonight after class to show him my progress. He liked where it was going and gave me some feedback, so I’ve spent the past few hours tweaking it even more and have posted some screenshots. I’ve decided to have the website load with the focus on the center to view the logo, then the camera will zoom to the upper left to the song selection. I made arrows to navigate songs to save on space as well as keep it easy to add a 6th song in the future without having to make room for it on the old design. From there, the camera will move to the right where the user remixes the song. Then it goes to the bottom right, which is going to be a loading / instructions screen for the visualization part. Then they goto the bottom left and can begin their music video. All of the non-background items are going to fade in and out based on when the camera is going to that section. Anyway, check them out below and be sure to click on the enlarged views!

Umphrey’s McGee’s Interface

Umphrey’s McGee’s Interface, with guidelines showing where the camera will go.

Nine Inch Nails’ Interface

Nine Inch Nails’ Interface again, with guidelines showing where the camera will go.

Interface Background

interface ideas

Chris — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 05:48:41 +0000

I met with a few of the people at Sedso Design tonight to go over a proposal for turning a printed piece that they had designed into an interactive website for a client who was a contestant on iron chef and owns a few restaurants. While I was there, I showed them the current incarnation of InteractMix with the new control scheme as well as each scenario screen. We discussed and sketched out a few ideas to keep each screen consistant, and figured that it would work well as one large space with the introduction in one area, and then pan and rotate into another part of the same background to present the next set of controls. They had suggested doing the same with the remixing screen, and I explained that each remix screen would be based around the album artwork. The idea we ended up agreeing on is to reduce the amount of information on the song selection screen by having one song presented at a time, with navigation to browse through the other songs, which works better if more than 5 songs get added, in how the song selection screen wouldn’t have to be modified to fit additional songs. From the song selection, the screen would zoom into the album artwork with the remixing controls appearing. after the remix is done, it would zoom back out to the full background of all the screens, then rotate to another area where the user would start placing objects in their music video. This also frees up areas that were originally going to take you from screen to screen and does so in a way that allows the user to know where they are at in the process without specifically telling them so with text. I’m planning on posting more screen shots soon after trying this idea out, so hopefully it makes more sense then.

Updates

Chris — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:18:14 +0000

I’ve been focusing a bit more on designing the website for the actual senior show this past week, and don’t have too much to report on the actual project itself. I’ll have some updates either later today or tomorrow, but as of now I’m basically just coding everything to get it working, then working on adding the remix tracks, and finally going over the design of each interface to tighten things up. I’m holding off on adding any new features that weren’t previously discussed, since there is a lot on my plate right now to get done, and I’d rather have a working project than a project that includes all the bells and whistles, yet doesn’t function at 100%. The mini critique last week helped me out in realizing I need to eliminate a lot of the text, yet still have it self explanatory so that I don’t have to be leaning over the user’s shoulder explaining each step of the process.