Sunday 4th July - Weekly Report 06

[David Williams <redache googlemail com>]

Hi Everyone,

This week has been slightly better than previous weeks as I've managed
to make some progress with my project.

Below is the weekly report which you can find at [0].

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What I've done this week:

This week I've been busy trying to get my score instrument working
within Jokosher and after a lot of help from Elleo (my mentor) I now
have a score instrument that emits correctly when it's added to the
Jokosher InstrumentViewer. My lack of experience contributed to me
getting confused about the scope of the emit as I had first tried to
emit from the constructor (which obviously doesn't work!) and then
having moved it to its own function, I attempted to emit it before the
InstrumentViewer had been created. Elleo offered guidance with it and
helped me get it working. There's a screenshot of it at [1].

I've also finished the MusicXML source element after some more help from
Elleo as I couldn't figure out why the Bus was failing when the score
was created. It turns out I'd misunderstood what size meant in the
context of do_create in Gstreamer source elements. So after he explained
what was wrong I managed to implement changes that lead to a source
element that works correctly (fingers crossed). 

During the week I've been playing with Pango and Cairo to get a
Stave/Notes rendered. I'm not sure if Pango is the way I will go in the
end but it's good to at least test it and see if it works. 

Plans for next week:

Next week I'll hopefully have a stave rendering correctly inside the
instrument and some rudimentary ability to add notes.

What I've learned:

Another set of eyes can be invaluable especially if you spend a few
hours on something getting more and more frustrated when it doesn't
work. A second set of eyes can spot the mistakes that you might not see
for a long time. I've also discovered I'm not always wrong when it comes
to what I try and do to fix things but I need to take a step back and
consider things more before pushing ahead. 

[0] - http://wp.me/pjdJf-2k
[1] - http://redache.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/score-instrument.png

Thanks for reading,

David Williams
Extending Jokosher to include a Musical Notation Editor