[Etoys] Sound tool refactoring and enhancement

[karl]

K. K. Subramaniam wrote:
> On Tuesday 06 May 2008 1:04:07 am karl wrote:
>
>   
>> The tools kind of work the way they are were but are arcane eg.
>> WaveEditor is really a sound/instrument loop editor not a tool for
>> editing general sound clips. I have started to make it into a general
>> editor to edit sound clips and have made good progress in that regard.
>> What are your thoughts on where these tools should move or not move ?
>>     
> If Sounds can be made into Etoys (like Sketches), then WAV editor can be 
> invoked through an edit halo button.
>
> FWIW,
> Subbu
Yes, that is a possible path. Now sounds are only represented as tiles 
in drop down lists Other access point are Recoding tool and the tool 
that pops up when a sound is d'n d into the morphic world. There is also 
the SoundLibraryTool that is found in the Objects tool. All of these 
tools will let you play the sound and hand you a tile of the sound, but 
the sound tiles are still abstract and must be embedded in scripts to be 
heard or accessed.

A benefit of a list is that you don't get the world overpopulated with 
morphs that could be hard to keep distinguished and organized.

A drawback is that is a different way of accessing a morph than the more 
tangible ellipse and sketches.

There is a little used tool called SoundSequencerMorph that play tiles 
dropped into it. It has a very minimal interface but it works and is 
really easy.

More advanced is the ScorePlayerMorph but as I said it needs to be 
initialized like this to be in editing mode:

 | n score | n _ 3.
    score _ (MIDIScore new tracks: ((1 to: n) collect: [:i | Array new]);
        trackInfo: ((1 to: n) collect: [:i | 'Instrument' , i printString]);
        tempoMap: nil; ticksPerQuarterNote: 96).
    ScorePlayerMorph openOn: score title: 'empty score'

Then you can bring up the piano roll and then the piano keyboard and 
then play sounds into the score.
Score player uses the FM synthesizer you can access a tool called 
EnvelopeEditor to edit the FM instruments.

There are lots of possible pathways here to make nicer sound / music 
environment but it needs to be thought through and carefully designed.

Karl