Synthesia 11 Release Estimate

Post by **Nicholas** » 08-07-20 12:12 am

They do by default. A little logo in the bottom corner and a little bumper at the end to tell about it. Example. (Man, that old, 2000's-era cell phone ringtone DLS synth sounds terrible...)

I never like forcing that kind of stuff on people, so it's easy to disable in the UI. I'm not sure I've ever seen either of those elements in a video in the wild. So, who can say how useful it has been?

Still, after 14 years there isn't much mystery as to which app is used to create that style of video. I've seen comments in those YouTube videos along the lines of "hey, can you make a Synthesia of 'song-name-here'?" which is pretty cool as far as brand recognition is concerned, but a little eerie as far as trademark distinctiveness goes.

jimhenry · Post by **jimhenry** » 08-07-20 8:18 am

Nicholas wrote: ↑08-07-20 12:12 am there isn't much mystery as to which app is used to create that style of video.

There isn't much mystery for a Synthesia user. But don't underestimate the mystery for viewers at large.

thiagolr · Post by **thiagolr** » 08-07-20 2:45 pm

A few years ago it took me some time to find out about Synthesia, I always watched Peter Plutax's videos and I didn't know they were made using Synthesia...

jimhenry · Post by **jimhenry** » 08-20-20 4:08 pm

jimhenry wrote: ↑08-05-20 12:10 amI would now say what happened is that starting with Synthesia 10 you decided that numbering major releases with integers, a practice that only started with Synthesia 9, consumed numbers too quickly. I would characterize each "point one-tenth" release starting with 10.2 as a major release. And you have been releasing those annually toward the end of the year. So I am not telling you anything you aren't already doing, although maybe unconsciously.

I think you do yourself a disservice every time you use the phrase "the upcoming Synthesia 11 release." It makes it sound like that is the next major milestone. I think it would be better to have the mindset that 10.7 is the upcoming release that is the next major milestone.

When you want to talk about features that will arrive with the use of MusicXML files in Synthesia 11, perhaps you should omit "upcoming" which has a whiff of sometime not too far off.

Post by **Nicholas** » 08-22-20 3:20 am

I'd answered the follow-up email fifty times before unifying on "upcoming".

Me: "That will be in Synthesia 11."
Them: "Oh, where can I download Synthesia 11?"

The future tense "will be" never seemed to matter. Whiffs or not, "upcoming" is the technically correct expression for the sake of auto-translator software and all the language barriers the official communication has to surmount, so it makes the most sense.

jimhenry · Post by **jimhenry** » 08-22-20 10:32 am

Point taken.

Post by **Nicholas** » 11-01-20 2:15 pm

: 2020-10.png (2.92 KiB) Viewed 953 times

This doesn't look like much, but there are some important differences vs. the last six months. Those little bumps weren't there before! I was able to squeeze in more actual-development work in October than every month since the start of the pandemic combined. About half of it was new impositions: Apple broke MIDI in iOS 14, Kurzweil thinks sending more Note Ons than Note Offs is a good idea, Apple deprecates half their APIs every time they release something and then demands that you update to the latest before you are allowed to submit app updates, etc.

The other half of the bumps are useful work:

1. The translations hadn't been brought up to date since 10.5... except for a manual correction here-and-there submitted by a user, or a whole new language contributed by a user (at some along the evolving state of the app). Figuring out which strings were missing in which languages, sorting out how the App Store listings need to be updated after 8 years with new features, and getting the raw, rough files from the translation service ($1,200 later

) integrated correctly into the app took more time than I expected. But it's done now and everything is caught up the way it should be.

2. Down stems are close. The renderer knows how to draw them just as pixel perfect as up stems now. It can beam them. The flags (or tails) are interesting because they tuck under the note, which means the stems on chords can get really long and kind of unsightly. The music font we're using has "short" flag variations for those cases and I'm thinking about using them when the stem gets ridiculous. Finally, when up- and down-stemmed notes happen on the same beat, they need to be pushed apart a little so they don't look like some yin/yang or figure eight thing. Lots of little details!

So we've got a combination of "new forced work" coming in and the phenomenon I described in the top post about this not being a perfect metric: a task list line that says "make sure X still works [after change Y]" might take 5 minutes. But a task list line like "Down stems" might take 50 hours. Progress on the graph is not linear. It looks flat for October, but the gears were turning again.

With any luck, 10.7 might go out the door in November. Hopefully.

Mte90 · Post by **Mte90** » 11-10-20 7:16 am

If you need help with Italian I can help with that, I contributed to a lot of open source projects with localization during the years for free.

reachdabeach · Post by **reachdabeach** » 01-19-21 10:22 pm

I have been developing software for over 40 years on various platforms, mostly Windows, but tinkered with mobile devices and did firmware in my early days. I think estimates are fine as long as no one takes them seriously.

My current job, which I have been at for several years, requires releases at specific intervals. We start out "feature boxed" meaning that we are going to stay in development mode with some potential instability until the features are done or we get too close and then we switch to being "time boxed". Certain features have to make it because of regulation changes. But lists never really seem to get smaller, just prioritized and some stuff gets put off until next time and some stuff stays on the list "for consideration" or "when we have some free time", meaning we just aren't telling whoever asked for it that it will never get done.

I did a little side project for someone in Java that was for a small specialized MIDI controller. The front end ran on Windows, Apple and Linux with no changes. I used an Arduino and C++ on the Arduino for the controller end of things. But it was just messing around with the serial data; nothing to do with the sonic end of things or notation. Since you have been on Apple products so long, I am guessing Objective C and some kind of UI layer that makes things look really similar everywhere. I have had your Android product a few years and only recently got it on Windows also. I was surprised to find it is almost identical. Very nice app; I hope it is rewarding for you.

Post by **Nicholas** » 01-20-21 1:49 pm

reachdabeach wrote: ↑01-19-21 10:22 pmSince you have been on Apple products so long, I am guessing Objective C and some kind of UI layer that makes things look really similar everywhere.

That's a good guess, but Synthesia was on Windows first by about a year before Mac. Even then, the old Carbon APIs were less scary at the time than all that new-fangled Cocoa stuff.

So, historically I've treated Obj-C as a platform-specific language (the way Java is for Android) and slowly built my homebrew cross-platform framework by avoiding anything that wasn't explicitly shareable.

Here are the GitHub language statistics:

: languages.png (4.78 KiB) Viewed 36 times

Java was above 5% a couple weeks ago and it was a victory to shave a few hundred lines off (replacing it with ~20 lines in C++). Now if only I could do that for the rest of the Java code!

reachdabeach · Post by **reachdabeach** » 01-20-21 4:59 pm

I miss C++ sometimes. I tinker in Arduino and one of my kids had to use C++ in college a few years ago. He joked that it was the first time since 3rd grade that I could help him with his homework. But professionally I have been immersed in c# and SQL the last several years. I wrote C/C++ for a number of years before that. I cut my teeth on bits and bytes in assembly and liked being able to drop into disassembled code and see what the processor was actually doing when weird things were happening. You get objects and inheritance but still control memory management. Objects went away when you wanted them to and the destructors were always called when they did. I have never trusted garbage control in the newer languages.

I would say I don't know beans about Java, but that's actually all I know. I did all my Java in NetBeans and don't know the ins and outs of all the files and folders required to do the simplest thing. I actually wrote a pretty complex app, but it's just Googling for what calls to make and writing logic in syntax that is still mostly the same old C style, operators and keywords. The Android stuff I did was in an app called AIDE that actually runs on the phone and you log into it from a terminal session on your desktop. It was a similar IDE that took care of details for you.

The one major redeeming value for Java was that a MIDI based app was 100% portable between Windows, Linux and Mac. I had to jump through hoops packaging it for Mac but the pain was mostly about getting the right JVM and libraries there. Even the MIDI library was exactly the same. But it was CC and Sysex messages. I was working on a little device that cached banks of presets so it could be mapped to controls in different environments and make settings portable. It worked and the guy who hired me used it but never found the market he thought he would.

I may tinker with making another device one of these days. Or I may choose not to look at another line of code after another 3 years or so and just become a freelance music producer with no clients instead of retiring.