I got the soundfont to work, or at least to work well enough for my prototype-creating purposes. It will need some fine-tuning in the future, but if I can manage to actually turn this software into a business, it would be nice to create a custom soundfont for it anyway.
I’m now almost to the point where I can start using this software to actually write some music, but I’ve still got a number of controls and GUI elements (buttons and stuff) to program. I need to add the abilities to do mainly the following:
- add and delete measures
- edit note / track variables such as
- release time (how long it takes an instrument to fade away after it has stopped playing)
- volume / velocity
- stereo position (left or right)
- edit reverb settings
- save and load files
- export and load MIDI files (depending on time; this feature isn’t too important yet)
- export MP3 or WAV files (at least look into it; if this is too time-consuming, it’ll be something to look into in the future)
I think that’s mostly it. And none of that stuff (save for perhaps the last one) should be too terribly difficult to code. So I think I can get it done this week!
After that, I will probably be a bit more secretive as I begin adding the “secret ingredients” which are my amazing world-class AI music generating algorithms, which will be the secret sauce of the business. For that, I will probably have to buy a dedicated server (or VPS), as those algorithms will be executed server-side. That’ll be fun.
Hopefully I’ll also be able to use this editor to actually compose some new tracks this April. I owe my few Patreon subscribers probably around a dozen or so tracks, and I want to get that new album out, which just needs one or two more tracks. And it would just be a good test of the software, even without the AI features, to see what composing with it is like. 122 days left!
Oh, what exactly will constitute success come July 31st? I mentioned earlier that success will mean that the software will either be at a point in which it’s ready (or close-to-ready) to actually market and sell, or in which a working prototype is ready to show to investors. Of course, those possibilities are not mutually exclusive, but at least one must be the case. But what does the latter mean? What will make it “ready” to show?
Anything really, so I can’t lose!
Seriously, though, it will mean that the software should be able to auto-write a complete song (minus lyrics) on its own. That’s melody, chords, orchestration. The algorithms are done, it’s just a matter of making them usable to an end-user and making their output as good as possible.
I’d ideally like the software to be able to compose something with the complexity of a Mozart symphony. That would be the true peak of Parnassus. And I’m positive we’ll have that soon enough. Maybe not by July 31st, but it would certainly be awesome, no?