Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Player.play() stops after 17 calls: A grueling, long-standing JFugue bug

If you use JFugue, it's possible that you've come across a bug where JFugue's Player.play() method stops play after it is called around 17 times. Brian Tarbox and I have been trying hard to track this one down... and we think the problem lies within the javax.sound.midi code.

It seems that Java's Sequencer.open() and Sequencer.close() methods might be happening asynchronously. As we were debugging this, we found that we'd get an IllegalArgumentException from a Sequencer that should have just been opened. It's possible that it was opened, but then the close() that was called shortly beforehand might have finally taken affect.

The bug is Issue 49 on Google Code, in case anyone would like to lend a hand!

Friday, January 13, 2012

Explore music and color with the Synesthesia Project

Andrew Hagerty has been working on the Synesthesia Project, which he describes as "A microtonal exploration that explores the link between music and color using the golden ratio (Phi)"

(and it so happens that phi is my favorite number - you can even see its central role in the Great Dodecahedron)

I'm so thrilled when I see people using JFugue for a project like this!

xpoles from Andrew Hagerty on Vimeo.

Log4JFugue 4 Scala

Brian Tarbox has been re-writing his award-winning* Log4JFugue project in Scala. Awesome!

You can read more about Log4JFugue in this article in PragPub Magazine: "...And Your Bugs Can Sing"

* - winner of the 2010 Duke's Choice Award for "Innovative Java for Developers"

New Project: jfugue-scala

There's a new JFugue-related project on Google Code: jfugue-scala

Earlier this year, Joshua Gooding (aka skavookie) started to creatie a Scala-based parser for JFugue's MusicStrings. There has been a lot of good work on this side-project, but there's also a fair amount more to do. The work had been done under the main JFugue project, but given the project's infancy, I'd like to move it to its own project for now. When the Scala-based parser is more solid, I'll be happy to promote it to the main JFugue project.

In the meantime, if you're interested in JFugue and Scala, I invite you to check out and contribute to this project!

Introducing my music blog!

Welcome! This is my blog for all things related to my experiences with JFugue, my Generative Radio project (What's that? Keep an eye here to learn more), and my general experiments with music programming.

If you also run a blog or site about music programming, generative music, algorithmic music, or anything of a related vein, let me know and I'll put you in my blog roll.