New song and other things

[Achenar]

I little song for the bonus screen. The address is this one:

http://www.geocities.com/pacoelflaco_2000/music/bonus.mid

Please tell me what you like and dislike of it.

Also, I've moved my songs to the music directory in my page, so the adresses change to:

www.geocities.com/pacoelflaco_2000/music/<<the file name>>

(if the link to the song leads to an empty page, click the go button again.)

[Pazolli]

I like it, I'm now off to implement the music through CoreAudio.

Mark.

[Kjurtyl]

If you're going to try the Core Audio route, I have a few tips to offer from what I've seen through my research.

First, documentation is scarce and hard to find, look into the ADC website, and find the Audio Developer button, that should ease the process. Right now there's no easy way to access Core Audio documentation but there's a good PDF to read if you follow that Audio Dev link.

The next thing you might want to look at is the midi services Core Audio has to offer. Apparently there might be a way to play midis right away with little code.

Lastly, if you don't mind wading through frameworks, I suggest looking into the AudioToolbox.framework. There is a MusicPlayer.h file in there that might be interesting to investigate.

I haven't had (and won't have) time to look into those things too deeply myself.

Good luck!

- Kjurtyl

[Pazolli]

It worked and didn't damage Hooptie's performance as much as QuickTime. Once I've got the bugs sorted out I'll release the code sometime tomorrow.

Mark.

[Pazolli]

Simultaneous posting :-)

Essentially that is what I did. Unfortunately, your multithreading code didn't make it. When QuickTime performance was affecting Hooptie, I thought if we put it in another thread the performance hit would be lessend - it never occurred to me that some libraries (like QuickTime) wouldn't be thread-safe. I'm sorry that all the work you did probably won't be used in the audio system. But, I hope you can take comfort in knowing that knowing how to multi-thread is a fairly advanced skill and will probably come in handy some day.

Mark.

[Kjurtyl]

This is heading a bit OT, but hey, it's our forum.

Not being thread-safe is one thing, one simply has to thread carefully. QuickTime is downright Cocoa thread-unfriendly because of it's Carbon nature. Some parts of AppKit are not thread-safe which makes Appkit also not thread-safe. That's why there's the lock/unlock/trylock commands. QT however, doesn't make it's data and processes very public, so there's nothing to lock/unlock/trylock on.

Multithreading will come in handy when we will be ready to try a hand at Internet Game Scoring. Essentially, instead of communicating with an instance of a class inside the app, we'd be communicating with another app on a server. The process remains the same however. Therefore I don't mind at all if my work on multithreading ends up un-included.

- Kjurtyl