Hello,
My name is Pathogen-David and I am planning to submit a proposal for Mixxx
to Google Summer of Code soon, but before I did I thought I should
introduce myself and get some questions answered.
First off, a little about me:
I've been interested in programming all my life, according to my parents I
was already attached to the computer when I was just a toddler, although my
personal memory of wanting to program goes back to when I was eight years
old and my father bought me a series of Visual BASIC books. From there I
only grew with GML in Game Maker, PHP, and learning C on the Game Boy
Advance. My primary languages of choice are C++, C#, PHP, and Ruby; but I
also well-versed in many others. I currently work as an intern at SPX
Cooling Technologies, where I write custom business software in C#, but I
am planning to quit that job in order to work on a GSoC project this summer.
As far as music goes, I'm not much of one for making or manipulating music,
but I do enjoy a lot of electronic music, especially Electro House and
sometimes Hardstyle. However, in general, I'm not terribly picky about the
music I hear. Whether it be someone mainstream like Deadmau5 or Skrillex,
or someone less known like Coburn or Phonat. I do have a friend who makes
music, does some DJing for fun, and he has all the fancy equipment like a
MIDI DJ turntable controller (can't remember the model right now, but I
want to say it is a Traktor brand.) He's let me mess around with his stuff
and taught me the basics of DJing, so I know the general process that is
going on. (Really makes you appreciate them more!)
Enough about me, more about Mixxx:
The first idea that struck me is one from the Library Preview Player from
the ideas page. From just messing around a bit with Mixxx, I have realize
that this is a feature I would really want.
Here is a quick mock-up I did of what the user interface might look like:
http://i.imgur.com/VN9kL.png
The way I envision it being activated would be through one of a couple
options:
- Middle clicking on the song with your mouse (Since currently middle click
does not do anything)
- Ctrl + Right Clicking (for people without middle mouse buttons, EG: most
laptops)
- Left AND Right Clicking (not sure if there is a good platform independent
way to do this in QT or not.)
- Pressing a Midi button with the song highlighted
I also see two possible "modes" for the preview play:
- You briefly tap the "activation button" (middle click, etc.) and then you
can interact with the waveform to choose a position in the song to play.
- You press and hole the activation button and it starts playing the song
from some user defined point* and stops as soon as you release (*Like a
setting in the options menu.)
My second idea that immediately struck me the first time I started Mixxx
was to fix this:
http://img.ctrlv.in/4f78d50fe6347.jpg
Everything in Mixxx looks very slick and professionally done, except for
(what I feel like) is a pretty glaring flaw in the skinning system.
Basically, this task would involve making the skin system not use fixed
values and instead use more dynamic flow-type panels. I know this is pretty
easy to do in C#+Visual Studio with its forms editor, but I have not used
QT enough to know exactly how this would work. (One goal I'd like to
achieve with Mixxx is to learn more about Qt.) My main concern with this
task is making sure that I wouldn't break backward-compatibility with older
skins.
I should also note that the "Library Database Management" idea on the ideas
page interested me as well, but I haven't used Mixxx enough yet to know
exactly what this would entail.
So overall, I want to know if my idea on how to implement the preview
player would be a good idea for Mixxx and which of the ideas the community
thinks I should focus on for my proposal (or if should I submit both!)
I've been poking around the source code and the default skins, and I plan
to get a build environment up and running here soon. Hopefully I can start
learning more about the general structure of the program before the summer
hits so I get hit the ground running!
Hope to be working with you all this summer!
~David M.
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