The Plan
Still I'm being hampered by my notebook being off for repair. Hopefully Sony will just replace the thing and that will be the end of it. I've had this machine about 16 months - of which it's spent about 2 months in their service centers. Doubt I'll buy Sony again.
Anyway, it's now coming up to a year since I started on Cantabile 2.0 (Apr 2006 I started on it) and have decided it's dragging out way too long. Usually I plan projects to run for about three months and break large projects into smaller bits - so 1 year is well beyond what I'm comfortable with. The work required on this version though didn't really break down easily - the whole GUI is being replaced after all.
So the plan is to get Cantabile 2.0 finished to the point where it has all the existing functionality of 1.2. This is going to involve:
- Finishing the audio and midi recorders and the new recordings list
- Re-integrating the MIDI sequencer. I was going to re-write this in preparation for MIDI editing, but I'm just going to port the old microscore view and leave it at that for now.
- Re-integration of off-line rendering. (this was in an early build of 2.0 before I ripped the UI apart and should go back in pretty easy once the sequencer is back in).
- Cleanup the other parts of the GUI to match the main window. (eg: the menus in Cantabile's other popup windows.) I'm just changing colors to match the main GUI - no re-writing in this area.
- Author some missing graphics for the ribbon buttons.
- Fix up the separate builds Lite, Demo and Full. At the moment I'm only building and testing the full version.
- Maybe, add simple audio playback capability.
- Removing the plugin organiser - not sure anyone actually uses this and it's pretty clumsy.
I'm hoping that should only take 4 to 6 weeks - assuming I ever get my notebook back. Once done, I'll probably release and alpha build for people to start playing with. I'll probably then spend about 4 weeks:
- ironing out bugs,
- performance tuning,
- cleaning up redundant code,
- updating the website, and
- time permitting I might sneak in a few minor improvements/new bits.
Following this, my rough plan is this:
- A separate product "Cantabile VST". Yes, Cantabile running as a plugin in other hosts.
- Cantabile 2.1 - which will mostly concentrate on editing MIDI and simple audio tracks - ie: the ability to place and position audio segments on audio tracks, side by side with MIDI tracks.
That's all for now.
Posted on March 9, 2008
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MightyPea says:
Hey, good to hear you're setting a goal for yourself, I'm sure I'm not the only one who's been anxious to have a play with this. Good of you to document everything in this blog, as well. It's been very interesting, even for someone who doesn't use Cantabile.
I had a question about the vst-version. Will this actually load into the host like Energy Xt's vst, or will the plugin be a button to open the Cantabile window (like Mobius or Usine)? The former is a lot more comfortable to work with, I find, especially if your host allows docking of plugins, but either way will be nice to have.