Isolationism

I’ve been working a bit more on Boodler in the past day or two; our lil’ squeaker has a pretty well-established schedule now, and he’s got us trained well: From the moment he’s out at bedtime we have a few hours (staying up as late as we dare) to ourselves to do what we please.

I’m hoping to pick up a small contract or two on the side to bring in some extra income; while I waited, I decided to do a bit of work on one of my favourite hobbies.

To start, I set up a Subversion repository and a Trac project-management system. For now, I’m the only one using any of it, but that’s fine—my intent isn’t to drag other people in (nobody’s contacted me yet about any interest in Boodler development) so much as to organize my own thoughts.

For starters, I’ve been working on “one-off” files of my storm for over a year now, and the only “backups” I have to speak of are the various copies scattered about on different computers. I can’t reproduce what my soundscape sounded like six months ago, either—all previous incarnations of my code between now and when I started are lost forever. Unlike a piece of code that becomes progressively better and more fully-featured, soundscapes are as much about evolution and experimentation as anything (considering how their product is highly subjective, unlike the addition of two numbers).

I don’t see myself working through too many bugs with my Boodler soundscapes, per se—after all, it runs for weeks uninterrupted — but the Wiki is another story. I’m hoping that it helps me chip away at problems I encounter so that when I have a spare hour or two to work on something, I can more or less pick up where I left off without having to sift through code.

Eventually, I’d like to open it up to other developers and sound designers, and share my own code. Not that I’ve done much, you understand, but that may change in the future (for now, all I’ve changed in Boodler itself is disabling a time limiter for the file writer output device so that I can write to a fifo—which gets encoded then streamed to whoever’s listening—ad ifinitum.) In the future I’d like to write a simple scheduler app that works outside Boodler (but sends messages to Boodler via boomsg) so that I can have greater control over scheduled events; if I were smarter I’d write some classes that could handle it within Boodler itself, but unfortunately I’m not (and the Generator class’ methods were all designed to be private anyway, not that I’d know where to start working with it regardless).

I’ve also been thinking about how to better distribute Boodler sounds; some kind of simple package seems like wisdom, obviously—but I’ve also been thinking about the possibility of bootstrapping certain sounds. Consider rainfall, for instance—a dozen one-minute looping samples of rainfall at high-quality bitrates would be pretty big, but what about using Boodler itself (and some judicious use of sox) to bootstrap those larger looping samples out of some much smaller, individual raindrop samples? Then there’s my long-time ambition to build a digital ceraunoscope following Andrew Glassner’s earlier work on the subject, but I still haven’t even got a copy of his article yet, and coding it is probably far beyond my ability to comprehend (in Python or anything else).

Last but not least, I’ve been thinking more lately about making my own sound recordings for use with Boodler. Freesound is good but finding stuff I want to use is tough work; the only decent mic I own is an AKG cardiod, so it’s useless for recording anything more than a few inches away, and only picks up frequencies around the range of the human voice—not so great for drops of rain or thunderclaps, as I was disappointed to discover last year. Right now the Roland Edirol D9 has my fancy, but it’ll be a while before I can swing the cash for it—maybe by the time it warms up enough out of doors to consider using one I’ll be able to afford it.

Anyway, how much progress I make will depend on how much free time I have. I hope that maybe in a few weeks I’ll be able to post a simple example of one of my Boodler agents for anyone interested to look at and download.