Den D. Vyrážím na cestu, jakou jsem v životě ještě nepodniknul. Mám před sebou měsíc cesty kolem celého Baltského moře a přes Skandinávii. Přes 5000 km, 10 zemí. Přes den mýma nohama, přes noc mou postelí se stane 15 let stará Oktávka combi v custom Pango úpravě (od mého bráchy).
Please meet HarmonEye for Android.
I'm happy to announce the release of this unique mobile app that is able to listen to live music via microphone, analyze it in real-time and show you the tones and chords being played in a visual way. And it's free.
Today I've decided to move my blog from Tumblr to Octopress and merge it with my homepage which is hosted on GitHub Pages. I realized I'm a unix-based guy and feel more comfortable with plain text files, Git, possibility to work offline and a set of scripts that I have access to than with some cool but untouchable web service. Recent static site generators like Middleman and Git-deployed hosting was like a holy grail sent from heavens. I used then before on other sites (eg. harmoneye.com). During a night I managed to set up an Octopress site locally, migrate the content and prepare for deployment. But the actual act of deploying to an existing GitHub Pages repository turned up to be a problem worth several hours of solving. Here's the description of how to do it as I didn't find the solution on the web yet. Hope it helps somebody.
The project is moving forwards! I've managed to merge the music-processing and visualization code and to tune the visualization so that it looks almost as good as the original desktop version. What remains is a major optimization by using a more advanced processing algorithm. In a few days it might be ready for launching on Google Play.
Today's productivity was very non-uniform. Almost whole day I had to work on another project and finally in the evening I could continue. I was thinging a lot about what would be the most suitable way of implementing the visualization via circular sectors. Finally I've managed to implement a viable prototype.
Since the music processing code is quite ready, now it's the time for the nice graphical UI - the visualization that gives sense to the numbers. The goal is clear - to port the existing visualization where each pitch class (a tone in an arbitrary octave) is represented by a circular sector. The intensity is represented by the sector's length and color. In fact each tone is divided into multiple bins for greater precision.
Worries are gone, euphoria is back! After today's handful of hacking it finally works, albeit on a very rudimental level. I've managed to get the audio input code working and ported the computation code to Android along with all the libraries. Thanks to the fact there's no native code, just Java, the transition was quite smooth. There's no fancy OpenGL graphical visualization yet, just a text output showing a bar graph of the intensisites of each tone bin in an octave. But when I sing or whistle to it, it shows the expected pattern.
I'm a bit worried. Trying to work (with an IDE like Eclipse-based Android Development Tools) on a slow home computer is turning into a neverending painful waiting for the disk to stop rumbling... I was trying to work on porting the audio processing code, but with no tangible results. Today I'm really not sure if I'll be able to get anywhere before the MacBook arrives or I move to another computer beforehand. :(
On the other hand, a today's talk with my brother was far more productive. We've came up with three product ideas! Two e-books with tutorials in his area of expertise and a web application to link people for demand and supply of some kind of useful information.
Over the next week I'll be trying hard to port the HarmonEye application from desktop to Android. You'll be able to watch the progress and experiences in this blog. And hopefully in a week there will be a app with most basic features available for downloading to your mobile device.
On Friday I've finally quit my daily job in order to focus on building my dreams. Although leaving an actual dream job at a company, almost a family, with great people and healthy atmosphere of freedom was not easy it is sometimes necessary to get outside your comfort zone in order to move forward. It is a first step to a broader lifestyle refactoring - a path to finding happiness and fulfillment in one's life.