Hello fellow ChucKists! I may have spoken about Guitar Zero on the list before. The program is an interactive ChucK program for practicing guitar. I have made major updates to it, so if you are interested you can get the source here: http://www.freedomodds.com/music/chuck/GuitarZeroText31.ck The way it works is that first you get a menu with a little bit of fun ASCII art on it, and you select an option that will determine what quiz game you get. Let's say you choose random notes. Guitar Zero will print a guitar fretboard with the notes labeled and one of those notes will be highlighted with a box of text. You play that note and Guitar Zero will actually recognize it using comb filters made with the magic of ChucK! If you play the right note Guitar Zero beeps and you get another note. The program keeps track of how fast you play, then at some point you type spacebar or "z" to exit and you get an exit screen with a performance summary. I should also mention that Guitar Zero accepts input from the line-in jack or from a soundcard. The microphone does not work all that well in testing. I am testing this program with some forum members of the www.justinguitar.com community. JustinGuitar is a site that offers free guitar lessons via youtube video, and really good ones too, all done by a guy named Justin in Australia. He accepts donations and that enables him to expand the site, offering 100 free videos and now he travels the world playing and teaching guitar. Enough about that. Anyway, the test users are international and the main problem they have with ChucK and Guitar Zero is the keyboard. It seems that international keyboards such as a British or Belgian or German keyboard are handled improperly by ChucK and they can't use the menu options properly. I am writing about that little problem so that maybe the DEV team will notice and perhaps look into it (hah, as if they were not busy already). Anyway, it's a minor issue because if I recall correctly from Ge's holiday email, ChucK will soon have... *** CROSS PLATFORM MAUI **** and also *** FILE I/O *** Wow! That is amazing news, as it is just the thing for Guitar Zero which is turning into it's own little application for guitarists. I just exchanged some forum messages with one of the forum admins and he has suggested creating some sort of abstraction layer in which chord construction can be done and also in which scales can be represented, among other guitarish things. I feel that file I/O will greatly enhance Guitar Zero, enabling input files that store such an abstraction layer without having to embed it in the code. Also Guitar Zero can play songs, or rather prompt the user to play songs, and these songs can be stored in text files. In addition it is desirable to store calibration data for each user's guitar so that proper signal recognition can occur. So here's three cheers to Ge and his code-wizard DEV team members for providing all of us with such a great upgrade to ChucK. OK, I'll close now, I've rambled on enough. Happy new year everyone and let's make this year a good one for music lovers everywhere! Les (Inventor)
Hey, Les!
I may have spoken about Guitar Zero on the list before. The program is an interactive ChucK program for practicing guitar. I have made major updates to it<snip>
This is lovely. I don't play the guitar but I like seeing people make musical games. It seems that international keyboards such as a British or Belgian or German
keyboard are handled improperly by ChucK and they can't use the menu options properly.
This is the bit I wanted to reply to. I use big IBM keyboards nearly all the time, I have two; one for my laptop and one for my desktop, these have a Dutch layout. My laptop (like nearly all, these days, it seems) has a US layout and so I occasionally have to use that as well. I haven't found a case where ChucK didn't handle both "properly". Clearly there are differences, differences that can make things tricky, like for example the extra key between the "Z" and the left shift or the three keys between the "L" and the "Enter" that the Dutch ones have and the US one lacks. This can be inconvenient, even confusing but I didn't encounter a case where I felt ChucK's behaviour wasn't "proper". Because of the way I tend to use the keyboard in musical interfaces I'm more interested in key location then I'm in the label on the key, I found that my_key_msg.which() typically refers to the same location on both (where possible) so I use that one most often. If your application requires certain messages based on the labeling I'd use the ascii value instead, those keys that don't have one (like shift or ctrl) should be the same for msg.which(). This can take some fidgeting and I realise this may be hard to write for if you lack keyboards with those layouts. There are many things about keyboards that we might call "improper". I for example feel that nearly all modern ones lack "proper" tactile feedback for typing and I don't like branding on keys either; few people seem to feel that way. I realise I'm in a extremely small minority to prefer a Dutch layout; to me anything else doesn't feel "proper" as that's what I'm used to, like you are used to a US layout. We can blame lots of people; we can blame keyboard manufacturers, we can blame governments for not yet having designed a single language for all of the world to use (I suspect a loby by professional interpreters and weapon builders who are benefiting from the confusion ;¬) )... but I also suspect this is one of the rare cases where we can't blame ChucK. That is, of course, unless you can point out a case where ChucK could have done better that I missed. I think poor ChucK is simply suffering from the same issue that we all have; a lack of standards and of languages differing. It's not ChucK's fault that English doesn't use characters like the "ß" or "ü", which is without even going into the ones used by Chinese, Russian or Japanese. I hope that either clarifies the situation or will encourage you to explain what I missed so far, maybe German keyboards do terrible things, like sending different signals for the cursor keys; I never tried one. Yours, Kas.
participants (2)
-
Kassen -
Les Hall