JAMES HOLDEN'S NEW TOY?

the 'crowd' while playing your MP3s or AVIs, backup system, school panic button and many more.

"I don't go out much because, I suck at dancing and I like to smoke weed too much. That and the fact that Australia outside of capital cities *SUCKS* for decent choons."

What about VioLet Composer?
"As I said, VC started when I was towards the end of some mammoth efforts on a really complex website. Frustration with working on XML over HTTP in Java made me desperate to do something a bit more 'immediate' and challenging in my spare time. I'd always wanted to mess with wavelets and sound, since I knew it was the best bet for things like pitch shifting in real-time. I'd always planned to do my own tracker as well, since nothing since Buzz seemed to have really gone outside the circle.

"So VC started life as some simple experiments in C++ to decompose a sample into wavelets and then play it back in that form. I was pleasantly surprised to find that my new Athlon XP was actually pretty damn fast at that, and at that point the idea of an event based audio stream really took shape in my mind. It's this feature that makes VC so different to other 'direct' streaming audio programs. To play a normal sampled sound, VC breaks it into timestamped packets. These packets are placed onto the audio buffer in real-time along with wavelets and who knows what in the future - VC could pretty easily be adapted to output video, MIDI, or just about anything simply by imagining event types and creating a way to render them.

"When I discovered that it would be possible for me to just use C# code files as plugins everything kind of fell into place. I started a SourceForge project and called it 'buzz-like'. This is the other key feature of VC - you can write the plugins inside the program while you are writing the music. You don't need any extra tools and you don't even have to be good at coding. If you can follow a simple script, you can probably get your head around the basic machines that come with VC.

"VC is at a stage right now where I am trying to focus on making the improvements suggested to me by users and so is heavily driven by user feedback, and I just don't get enough. I'm also desperate for help with coding, documenting and spreading VC so I'm hopeful some of your readers will join in the 'fun'."

Why did you decide to make "Violet Composer" an open source project?
"I don't want to go into the whole commercial versus open-source argument, but I believe there will always be a place for free software, and the idea of collaborating online to build an application while certainly not new is an exciting one for any developer who wants to invest a serious amount of time in a hobby project - it means everyone can have a go at making things better.

"The Gnu Public License or GPL ensures that the source code for VioLet Composer will always be available.

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