Interface changes… again
Posted by Chris | Filed under Uncategorized
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!
Posted by Chris | Filed under Uncategorized
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…
Posted by Chris | Filed under Uncategorized
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.