Making GCompris sound more Musical - Weekly Report 8

[Karthik S <itskarthik s gmail com>]

Hallo Gnome :)

After successfully passing the mid-term evaluation, I had a detailed discussion with my mentor about the added features. He gave me a lot of constructive suggestions, And I have almost implemented them all :)

This has been the code cleanup week, I ve removed traces of hard-coding and made it robust.

Piano Activity

• This week I implemented the 'Music Synthesiser' part, which is actually as a separate activity in my proposal. After discussing with my mentor, I clubbed it with Piano itself, used the pysynth library to convert the '.gcpiano' files into '.wav' format. The '.gcpiano' file contains the notes in text format, it is converted into a tuple list and given as input to 'make_wav' in pysynth library, this will easily do the job of creating the .wav file.
  
  
• Instead of load notes feature I changed them into play feature, where the kids can listen to the tunes that they played from the wav file they saved.
  
  
• Another feature implemented in Piano -- making it completely non hard coded, I had saved the notes array and names of each level inside the program, now everything goes into the activity.desktop files. The number of levels is decided by the content present in the config file activity.desktop.
  
  
• Apart from that, I've added tooltips for each icons, so that it can be discoverable by the users

Sing Along Activity

• I made semantic changes in the desktop file, after long discussion with the mentor, changed each note as note_1 = X which makes it more logical than the previous version.
  
  
• Again this has been made totally non hard coded, everything fetched from activity.desktop and even the levels.

I should say, I removed a LOT of junk code this time! :)

I'd like to add the sing Along mode in the Sing along activity, and adding mouse interface to the piano so that it can be used in touch-screens too!

Code :�http://git.gnome.org/browse/gcompris/tree/src/piano-activity?h=gcomprismusic

Branch :�gcomprismusic (http://git.gnome.org/browse/gcompris)

Thanks,
Karthik Subramanian
GNOME, GSoC
+91 99401 38729

http://yeskarthik.in

Be Happy always!! :)
Chennai