Saturday, May 13, 2006

Polishing MusicVISTA

First I want to thank everybody helping me polish up MusicVISTA and eliminate the remaining glitches. I’m rebuilding some recent AMT projects and soliciting feedback as to any confusion or problems with the new music research analysis.

In the past few days, in addition to squashing a few bugs, I’ve added a couple of capabilities to the software:

Sample Size

I’ve discovered that research companies doing the “data gathering” part of the music research don’t always disclose exactly what their sample sizes were, or they hide the information. In MusicVISTA, you can now get the sample size information from the VIEW menu. This can also be printed out. And when selecting information to include in a report, the sample size will automatically appear if you pause the mouse over the name of a report break.

Browser

People want to do more with the Resource Browser. So I gave it full navigation, including the auto-suggestion feature found in Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Secure Installation

I discovered that the new installation method from Microsoft, while nice for me doesn’t seem to work well if we want to keep your analysis stored in a password protected folder on the Web site.

But of course, we do want to protect your research. So I have modified the program setup, and that means it will seem as though nothing has changed!

What I mean by that is that things will now work as they did before. You’ll download an installation package and double-click it to start the install. Just like always. Of course, what happens next is very different, but your part doesn’t change. The “setup” program will verify that the new Microsoft “Dot Net Framework” is installed on your computer or else download it for you and install it. Then the Windows Installer will run automatically and install MusicVISTA, in exactly the same way as other Windows programs.

Feedback

So far, I think 100% of the feedback has been that we’ve made it easier to implement your music test and make your programming as good as possible. That kind of feedback has been very good to hear. As I may have mentioned, this has been a big project – more than a year and a half so far.  To those looking at the “beta” versions: Don’t stop now! I welcome all observations and feedback.

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