Happy New Year - Time For A New Start

If you're celebrating new year today, have a happy one. Let's hope it's somewhat better than 2020.

First new year's resolution: I'm making myself start on a new application. As discussed in my previous post I was trying to decide whther to write something that helped in creating sample instruments for the Sforzando sampler or whether to write a program to help generate music from mathmatical sequences.

EDIT: Should have known I'd never keep a new year's resolution: I got distracted!

The second choice has won out for two main reasons:

  1. I treated myself to the industry standard Kontakt (£eek!) sampler for Christmas. This is so much more sophisticated than Sforzando (£0) and I'll be using that to build new sample instruments instead. (As an aside, the fact that Kontakt has a scripting language that uses the := assignment operator pleases me more than it should!)
  2. Mathmatical sequences appeal to the dormant mathematician in me.

So, there we are. Oh and there'll be a bonus mini-app.

It's pretty obvious that I'm going to need to emit MIDI data from the new app. I've never worked with MIDI before so I'll need to spend some time getting my head around that. Thanks to info from Anders in a comment on my last post, I'm intending to take the midiio Delphi components for a test drive to see if they work out. To that end I've cloned the repo into my GitHub account.

And here's where the bonus app comes in. In order to test midiio in a real application I'm planning to write asimple MIDI display application before embarking on the bigger project. This app will simply read MIDI from a file and display an English language description of what it reads. Maybe it'll allow some manipulation of the MIDI before resaving it or playing it on a MIDI device - dunno yet.

Right, well that's the plan. And it'll also be the first code I write with Delphi Sydney. Looking forward to it. EDIT: Turns out that this was the the first code I wrote with Delphi Sydney!

As a way of commiting myself to this, I've opened two new projects on GitHub (both currently empty):

  1. The main project, MathsNMusic, is at delphidabbler/maths-n-music. (North American brethren, please note the UK English spelling of maths!)
  2. The little test app, MIDIView is at delphidabbler/midiview.

I'll try to remember to blog about how it all pans out.

Comments

Post a Comment

Comments are very welcome, but please don't comment here if:

1) You have a query about, or a bug report for, one of my programs or libraries. Most of my posts contain a link to the relevant repository where there will be an issue tracker you can use.

2) You have a query about any 3rd party programs I feature, please address them to the developer(s) - there will be a link in the post.

3) You're one of the tiny, tiny minority who are aggressive or abusive - in the bin you go and reported you will be!

Thanks

Popular posts from this blog

Initialising dynamic arrays

When writing some unit tests a while ago I found myself needing to initialise some dynamic arrays with test data. It would be nice if we could do something like this: var A : array of Integer ; begin A := ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ) ; // !! WRONG end ; but we can't. So I decided to write some functions to initialise dynamic arrays to the contents of another array, be it a constant, a literal or another dynamic array. The result was a set of overloaded routines, one for each data type I needed to handle, for example for Integer and string arrays I had: function CloneArray ( const A : array of Integer ) : TIntegerDynArray ; overload ; var Idx : Integer ; begin SetLength ( Result , Length ( A ) ) ; for Idx := Low ( A ) to High ( A ) do Result [ Idx - Low ( A ) ] := A [ Idx ] ; end ; function CloneArray ( const A : array of string ) : TStringDynArray ; overload ; var Idx : Integer ; begin SetLength ( Result , Len...
Read more

Deleting elements from a dynamic array

In my blog " Initialising Dynamic Arrays " I mentioned I have been writing some unit tests that needed numerous repetative array initialisation operations. Well, one of the other common operations I found myself writing was the deletion of items from dynamic arrays. So I decided to find a generic way of doing this. Assuming we know the index of the item to be deleted we need the equivalent of Delphi's built-in Delete procedure for strings. If you read the previous post you won't be surprised to learn that I decided to further extend the Generics.Collections.TArray class by adding to the TArrayEx class I introduced there. My first attempt emulates Delphi's Delete procedure by deleting the array element in-place: i.e. it updates the array passed as a parameter. Unsurprisingly the method is called DeleteInPlace . Here's how it goes: type TArrayEx = class ( TArray ) public .. . class procedure DeleteInPlace < T > ( var A : ...
Read more

New String Property Editor Planned For RAD Studio 12 Yukon 🤞

Image
This blog post is based on a pre-release version of the RAD Studio software and it has been written with specific permission by Embarcadero. No feature is committed until the product GA release. It seems I'm getting very excited about multi-line strings of late. My previous post was about multi-line string literals for Delphi  and this time I'm talking about the new multi-line string property editor being slated for the RAD Studio 12 IDE. For more years than I care to remember, I've been frustrated by the inability to enter multi-line strings in the Delphi IDE object inspector. That meant having to resort to code to initialise some multi-line labels. So frustrated was I that I wrote a little property editor of my own ( stringpe ), way back in 2004. It's still around and on GitHub. Here's what it (sometimes) looks like: Yeah, I know this is Vista - I used an old screenshot Sometimes? Well it looked like that until it got installed on DPI aware Delphis, and then it sh...
Read more