Christopher Souvey's Blog

I got an email today about adding a play-along piano to Musical (simple onscreen piano lessons–light up key style).  Is this something you would be interested in?  Would you want a bunch of built in songs, a way to import MIDI files, etc?  Please comment on this post or email me, and if I get enough responses I will gladly implement the feature (it should only take a day or two to write).  Remember, all new updates will be for Musical Pro, available now in the Market for $2

As you all know, I uploaded a new version of Musical to the Market tonight.  I just checked my comments, and apparently my application Force Quits now when you open the Keyboard and Piano!  I tried for about 30 minutes to replicate the problem myself, but could not get it to happen (and since the Market doesn’t let you buy your own application, I couldn’t see if it had to do with the Market).

I did a bit of Googling, and apparently the issue occurs when you change the Copy Protection status on the application.  After reading how useless Android’s DRM was, I had decided to just disable with this update (particularily since it halves the size of the app too).  From what I can tell in the Google Developer Group, when you update to an application with a different DRM status, all WebViews cause Force Quit errors!  I can’t find any workaround and Google doesn’t appear to have even acknowledged the bug.

So, I have re-enabled DRM again on the application until I can find evidence that this issue is fixed, which will hopefully fix this problem.

All users who have updated OR bought the application between around 5pm and 11pm PST Sunday should uninstall and redownload Musical.  I am told that this will fix the problem (I would do this even if you aren’t having the problem, becasue if you just bought it, you will have this problem the next time I update).

And that my friends, is how I learned my lesson about DRM.  It’s a disaster.

As planned (see last post), I have released an update to the piano for Musical Pro.   The Keyboard and Piano both now support any of the 128 General MIDI instruments (including such favorites as “gunshot” and “bird tweet”).  In addition, I have added a popularily requested feature–choosing what octaves the pianos operate in.  The improved backend also seems to have made the piano load faster and be generally more responsive.

The update is already available in the Android Market as a free upgrade to all Musical Pro owners.  The download should approximately cut Musical’s filesize in half, down to around 250kb (the side effect of this, however, is that the Keyboard and Piano now require an SD card).  Much of the Piano and Keyboard are completely rewritten, so as always, feel free to email me if you encounter any problems.

I just finished rewriting the architecture of Musical’s piano system. I have not made a public release yet and the front-end isn’t yet different, but the back-end now supports any MIDI note and any of the 128 MIDI instruments. In the new few days (hopefully by the end of this weekend), I will be writing a new “Settings” interface for each of the pianos (2-octave keyboard and 3-octave scrolling) that allows you to choose which octaves you want the piano to use and lets you choose what instrument you want the piano to sound like! I hope to release this feature to all Musical Pro owners on or by Monday.

Also related to the piano, I have just gotten permission to include a nice collection of drum loops in Musical. I plan to try add them to the piano in the next week, so you will be able to choose a beat & tempo and play along. This too will be a free upgrade for all Musical Pro owners, and I will post more information in the next week or so, once I’ve started the implementation.

Finally, looking a bit further into the future, I’ve finished designing the interface for a simple melody/notation editor with MIDI export capabilities. The screen will be split between a miniature piano on the bottom and a musical staff on top, with buttons in between to choose note length, insert rests, etc. Expect more details (and possibly a preliminary release) in the coming weeks.

Oh, and I enjoy being spontaneous sometimes, so just because something isn’t on this list, doesn’t mean it won’t be coming out the next couple weeks (in fact, there will almost certainly be some surprises).

I have just released the Pro version into the Android Market for $1.99

At the moment, the only major difference is that the Pro version includes a simple tuner.  The tuner includes frequencies built in for common string instruments (guitar, violin, mandolin, bass, ukulele).  Unlike the “pitch pipe” feature, however, it allows you to enter custom arbitrary frequencies.  It still operates pitch-pipe style though (tuning by ear), but as soon as Android allows it (Cupcake, whenever that happens), I will try to make it work with the microphone.  There are also some minor interface tweaks to make room for all the new features I plan to add.

Most (if not all) future feature updates (not bug fixes) will now only be added to the Pro version rather than the Lite version (and all will obviously be free upgrades to purchases of the Pro version).  Here is a sneak peek of the some features on my ToDo list that I would like to add to Musical Pro (disclaimer: this is my personal wishlist, not guarantees, but I will try to complete as many of them as I can):

• Real Tuner (depends on when Cupcake comes out)
• Games (rhythm-based, music theory practice, etc)
• More Instruments (drums? violin? xylophone? others?)
• Circle of Fiths
• Intervals (and interval recognition practice)
• Scales
• Additional Languages (as the Android Market adds paid apps to other countries, and as I find people who will translate for me )
• Melody/Notation Editor (with MIDI export)
• Recording Virtual Instruments (if possible, with MIDI export)

If you want to try out the new Tuner, Android Market lets you download a paid app and get your money back if you return it within 24 hours.  I believe though if you do this now, you won’t be able to use this trial at a late date when I release more features, so be aware of that if you do.

Another thing to note: the price is starting at $1.99, but if I get a bunch of these new features in, I may raise the price as I see fit.  If you buy it now though at the introductory price, all upgrades are free.

Thanks for all the support, and enjoy Musical Pro!

I’m trying to prioritize features for the next release of Musical.  If you use the application and have a minute, I would really appreciate it if you filled out a little survey (its reasonably short and all the questions are optional).  Click here if you’d like to fill it out. Thanks in advance for your help in making Musical better!

I seem to get the same questions and complains over and over again, so I’ve decided to write a up a post to clear them up (apologies in advance if this seems bitter–its not intended to be… I just want to stop the spread of misinformation).

Why doesn’t Musical have multitouch?  I’ve seen videos! The G1 does support multitouch!

I’ve been getting a lot of comments recently about multitouch for Musical. Musical will never have multitouch on the G1.  There.  I said it. I am aware that the G1′s screen supports primitive multitouch and that those with root access (and JF1.4) can take advantage of it. However, this multitouch will NEVER (I repeat… never) be sufficient for playing a multitouch piano. This is not a software limitation–it is a hardware limitation with the G1′s physical screen. Multitouch on the G1 will never be useful for much more than gestures (pinching, scrolling, etc).  According to the blog of the developer of JF1.4, which allows multitouch on the G1 (Luke Hutchison):

• Only supports 2 fingers (so still no chords, and not really that much better)
• Fails completely when fingers are close together (and on a piano, they will be as close as they could be)
• When the 1st finger is lifted but the second is not, the second finger turns into the first finger (so it doesn’t tell you when you release them and the keys would get mixed up)
• “The G1′s screen is a much better device for multi-touch scaling than it is for multi-touch rotation or more general multi-touch input, because the distance between the two touch-points in multi-touch can be measured a lot more reliably than the actual position of the points.”

Why isn’t there a tuner? The G1 has a mic, and Shazam is able to figure out the whole song!  Why can’t figure out even one note???

As I have said many times, the G1 does not support live audio input.  There is no way to analyze the sound coming into the microphone (except for getting very low resolution and basic volume/amplitude information).  Shazam does not perform live audio analysis.  It records 10 seconds or so of audio, uploads it to Shazam’s server, then downloads the name of the song which their server calculated from the uploaded recording.  The only current way to get pitch information from audio is to record a sample, and then analyze it after the fact.  It is impossible to analyze audio as it is being played (although according to the internet, the mythical cupcake revisions will remedy this).

Why is there no grand piano? 3 octaves isn’t enough!

Android currently provides no way to directly play midi notes (javax.sound.midi is not available on Android).  The only way to play midi sounds on command (at a reasonable speed) is by preloading midi files into memory and then playing those.  Unfortunantly, the only API that will work for this is not yet complete, undocumented, and unstable.  Based on my testings, loading more then 3 octaves of sounds into memory at once makes the application extremely unstable and prone to crashes.  When I initially released the application, I provided a full grand piano.  My rating immediately began to plummet as my inbox filled with complaints about the keyboard being slow and crashing frequently.  So I quickly chopped out all the octaves but the middle 3 and reuploaded the new version.  The market rating began to rise again.  Unfortunately, the emails about crashes were quickly replaced with emails that 3 octaves wasn’t enough.  For now (hopefully an update in the near future will remedy this), its either flexibility or stability.  I (and the extremely negative reviews I recieved) decided that a keyboard that could always play 3 octaves was better than a keyboard that could sometimes (due to crashing) play all of them.

I just released a semi-minor update to Musical with a much requested feature.  The 2-octave stacked keyboard is now mapped to the physical keyboard.  This means that the keyboard is now “multitouch” (well… you can play more that one note at once at least, although its more difficult on the keyboard than the screen).

The reason I was able to release this is because I finally gave up on Dell after they shipped me a new SSD… for my laptop… which they have (see last post) and borrowed another machine to use for developing.  I’m currently in Tahoe with a friend for a weekend of skiing (I’m posting this from my laptop tethered to my G1), and about 4 hours after we left, FedEx finally delivered my laptop.  Again, thanks Dell—a little late.  Hopefully I’ll be able to release some more updates this weekend, but it depends on how good the skiing is (it’s supposed to be pretty bad—icy and it might rain/snow).

And finally, Musical has hit 500 reviews!  It’s currently at 507 reviews (4.16/5), 33456 downloads, and 15043 installs.

Side note: Google is planning on releasing the Market in “Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Netherlands, and Poland in the coming weeks”.  If anyone wants to waste 10 minutes or so, I would love to be able to translate the very limited amount of text in the app to other languages… otherwise I’ll have to either limit it to the English speaking locations or use the dreaded machine translation.

I just broke 25,000 downloads of my Android application, Musical! Here are my current statistics according to the Developer Console:

• Downloads: 25015 total
• Active Installs: 11344 (45%)
• Reviews: 409
• Rating: 4.07/5

My laptop’s SSD died a few days ago (completed wiped itself), so I’m going to be taking a break from developing Musical until Dell fixes it (I’ve arranged a repair and the box should be arriving soon). I super lucked out though and have a 100% up to date backup (I didn’t lose a single thing). I was going to try out Windows 7, so I made a full backup of my SSD to an external HD and then wiped the SSD to install Windows 7. A few hours later, the SSD was gone (and, as much as I’d like to blame it on Windows 7, I don’t think it’s possible). Since I did all of my Android development on that machine, I’m just going to wait until Dell fixes it, then restore my backup. If Dell takes an outrageous time (which is completely possible–they already mixed up my phone number with a random business customer also in Santa Cruz and tried to schedule a repair to fix a cable on my Latitude notebook… nice try Dell), I’ll have to setup one of my other laptops with the Android SDK. Whatever happens though, I will post updates here on my blog. The frustrating thing, is that I got a SSD based laptop because of my terrible HD luck (every hard drive I’ve ever had in a laptop has corrupted itself)–apparently my plan worked out great…it only lasted a few months before completely destroying everything (although it was also my first Dell laptop, having previously used IBM ThinkPads and HP consumer notebooks, so I can always blame it on Dell). Thanks Dell!