Concert
Concert is an online collaborative organizational tool for sounds. I am developing Concert as part of Software Design and Documentation class here at RPI. See our wiki for more information. The idea behind Concert is that many groups of musicians, like [ ], record practices and riffs with the intention of going through them later and picking out the good from the bad. With our band anyway, this has not been working. Mostly it is because the recordings are on my computer, and we have yet to sit down altogether and sort through them all. When we have time to get together, we prefer to work on new material, or simply play, thus producing more recordings.
Concert solves not only this problem of choosing the good from the bad, but also solves the problem of organization of the various audio "segments". Concert will allow all the members of a group, say Tim, Garrett and myself, to collaboratively listen to each of the audio recordings that we have piled up on our own time. A user of Concert can then highlight a segment of one of these audio recordings and "tag" it, effectively organizing parts of the audio recordings. Other users in the same group will be able to see these changes, and add/remove audio segments from these tags.
On the technical side, we have a few challenges to face. One challenge is on the backend, with the audio manipulation. We are hoping to provide the functionality for a user to download an "audio segment", that is, a segment of an audio file that they have previously uploaded. Another set of challenges, which are the ones I am trying to deal with, are on the client-side. We are hoping to use HTML5 instead of flash for the audio playback. I have already solved a few quirky issues that I've found with this new technology, and overall it seems fairly solid.
Overall, we hope to have a small working prototype of Concert by the end of the semester. We'll see where this takes us.