Well, heres the next version of Blind Audio, much improved over the first although there are not a whole bunch of new features. I addressed most of the bugs brought up in the bug thread and added a few nifty things.

Known Issues:

- Unoptimized for speed
- Some latency issues switching between samples, even in fast-switch mode
- Has only been tested on win32 with Sun JRE, this means it may or may not work on other
platforms properly in some cases (although it should)
- When loading a large amount of files, "Ratings so far" graph does not resize text properly
- Sometimes when seeking forward after time range has been specified, playback will continue past upper range

Changelog:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
BlindAudio 0.2.0 alpha
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Changes by Brandon Clark
-Speed Optimizations
-Fixed seeking bugs
-Improved latency on playback
-Improved time position accuracy
-Added Fast sample switching option
-Improved time range playback functionality
-Added feature to reset test with new samples
-Sample Loader only shows .wav files
-Rating sliders now respond to keyboard arrows
-When time range specified, red line appears beneath slider representing range

Again, please report any bugs you find and i will try to address them in a more timely manner this time.

Next on the todo list is primarily encryption and client side encoding/decoding . Plus i am planning on working on reducing the latency issues considerably so stay tuned. Anyways, here it is

BlindAudio0.2.0a.zip

Yay!

One initial comment (already relayed to Sphoid in chat): I'd prefer the preference scale have a resolution of 0.1 instead of the current 0.5.

When I look at my results.txt file in notepad, I notice some funny characters in there.

It would be nice if you could load up a text file which contains the list of files to use and where they come from. I'm working on a Windows-only ABC/HR tool which hopefully won't have as big of a problem with switching latency. I'll probably be ready in a week or thereabouts, and I'll release the source as well.

An alternative to java is to code up a separate application for each platform, which allows for speed optimization. I'm using Visual C++ 6 with MFC, but JohnV says he could code up a version for Linux really quickly using Delphi

But here is the configuration file format I am currently thinking of using:



Up to 8 different samples (aside from the original) will be allowed in my application.

ff123

I think perhaps a better idea, one which sphoid and I have been toying with lately after having tried to get java working better for us, is to code something in C and use some cross-platform apis like gtk+ for the gui and sdl for the sound portion. That way it wouldn't be much of a hassle to maintain updates across various platforms, and the performance should still be there.

Though, seperate programs work too I guess

Anyway, some more known bugs with this version:

- does not always seek back to 0 properly
- does not always seek to end of file properly
- when playing, if holding down seek, upon letting go, playing does not resume.
- seeking sometimes lags when holding down button.
- towards the end of file, pause does not always work properly.
- if paused and hit play button instead of resume, resume does not untoggle properly.
- seeking does not work properly towards end of file.
- if loading 2 samples of different length and having set a playback range value, the playback range indicator (red bar) is only representative of that range for the original file the range was set for. Thus, if you switch to a file of a significantly different length, the indicator does not update properly to match the actual range anymore.

Most of these bugs are trivial and should be fixed quickly.

Hrmm... followup from my earlier post on the possibilities of a cross-platform player in C/C++, it looks like two libraries which might work very well for this would be Paragui for the gui and SDL_sound for the sound portion. Both are based on SDL.

Using SDL for everything sounds like it might be less of a hassle then trying to do gtk+ across so many platforms... and also, both of those libraries apparently work on linux, mac, win32, beos, and possibly more.

Would anyone be interested in helping out in such an endeavor? I'm starting to think this might be a much better solution than Java for a cross-platform audio util...

Played around with it a bit.. nice work.. the annoying "system sound" error seems to be fixed, too.

Some issues: In "fast sample switching" mode, the "current position" slider gets stuck at the end of the file, after it's been fully played back once. I can't make it play the samples after that... only be moving the slider back to the left with the mouse.

While i was still in fast sample switching mode, there was an error with the playback range... a small red dot appeared at the very left of the "current position" thing, where the playback range line would appear if i set it to start at 0. But i didn't touch the playback range, it was still 00:00.000 to 00:00.000. Now the sample always started at the beginning when i clicked on one of the "play" buttons, and it didn't switch between the samples during playback anymore (note that i was still in fast switching mode).

And a feature request: I missed an option to reset the playback range, either to reset both fields, or each one independently (would be even better).

Just a quite note now that the source has been released and the Java version will no longer be supported... The above problem is probably because of unicode. I assume you opened the file with notepad? If you try wordpad or any other fairly decent text editor, everything should look fine. This is the same kind of thing you run into all the time when opening unix files with notepad, etc....

Which is the best one , which the easiest (hihi, for users), at the moment ?

PCabx.com and their program or the tool BlindAudio from here ?

I have installed BlindAudio 020 from here.

It looks quite cool, self explaining.

I think, it is more appropiate for testing as pcabx ?
Because otherwise you would not spend time in developing BlindAudio tool.

You might want to look into using Qt by Trolltech it is supposed to be fairly easy to code and very cross platform (you'd get Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X w/o any problem). It is (atleast was) free to use as long as the program's source code was available. Doesn't do sound by itself, but SDL would be another good choice (like people have said). Definitely something to look into, seems a little bit better developed than gtk+ (due to its commercial nature, but let us not start a holy war over which is better).

It might be a good idea as well to coordinate with ff123 about the configuration and results files, or atleast the configuration. That way it would be easier to use either program, because it will accept a "standard" test configuration. Testers wouldn't have to write different version to allow for the broadest range, or have to cut people out of the test because a program doesn't work (like Linux or Mac people with ff123's program).

I have found ff123's abc tool. But that works only with given test projects ?

So that the user is not able to setup his own comparison test ?

BlindAudio development has stopped. AFAIK it will not pick back up.

I have done some preliminary work on a successor which uses SDL and gtkmm. Qt is cross-platform but the windows version and mac version are non-free. At least the up to date versions are. It's likely that if I continue to develop the program I'll go with wxwindows from now on.

At any rate, a player core was completed some time ago which natively played mp3, vorbis, flac, a bunch of different wav formats, etc. I was working a little on an AAC plugin and then an MPC plugin as well.. but didn't finish either.

Anyway.. this project is a bit on the backburners right now because, 1 - ff123 has released a comparable tool that does a decent job.. (though the fact that it's windows only needs to be addressed somehow...), and 2 - I'm working on the "next generation" HA so to speak.. so I don't have time to do much on this for now.

Things may pick back up at some point.. we'll see.

I'm working in an another Win32 ABX comparator, with more features and I think more flexible than PCABX. I hope I will release a working version on the next few days. I have a working version right now, but I want to complete some of that additional features. I will add more features over time.

Just edit the text configuration file to set up your own comparisons. I don't have a dialog box yet which allows you to do this from inside the program.

ff123

FYI, I'm about halfway done implementing a cross-platform (wxWindows for GUI, choice of libao or straight OSS for sound output) "clone" of ff123's tool. I can't promise a finish date, since this is a spare-time effort, and my spare time is limited , but I'll definitely make it known to the HA community when it's finished.

Cheers,

Carsten Haese.