Moving Music Research Software Into 2011

I’m staring at a long list of things I hope to accomplish in 2011. All of them are connected to making music research a more powerful and accurate tool for program directors around the world.

New Year, New Foundation

First step taken: I have moved the MusicVISTA software to a new version: Windows Seven and have set it up within Microsoft’s powerful Visual Studio 2010 development system.

That needs a brief explanation. Modern software does so much now, with all the visual elements, communications and multimedia, etc. that without some help, it would be impossible for mere humans to write computer programs.

Fortunately, huge and powerful systems have been invented to help. For Apple, the set of tools most often used is called XCode. For Microsoft it is Visual Studio. In addition, Microsoft provides a powerful version of the been-around-forever Basic language. It is called Visual Basic.Net. An example of the power: You can draw a picture of a Web browser and, yes, you now have a real Web browser waiting for the address of the page you want to display.

VB.Net is so easy to use that even I can write powerful software like MusicVISTA. You can too. There is even a free version that is far more powerful than you’d expect.

But MusicVISTA was first created about 5 years ago (as an update to the old Variety Control/MusicVUE package. Reflect on how much computers, including Windows, have changed during the past few years. With all the major updates we plan, we need the latest tools, completely compatible with Windows 7. Hence the update.

Already Making Improvements

The second step, and the first move to leverage the VS2010 environment, was to rebuild our way of playing music hooks. MusicVISTA has for some time been able to play back hook files. You can play one hook, all the hooks that define a music cluster center, or a group of hooks selected from the results display.

For those who use this feature: We are now building custom Windows Media Player playlists with the hooks we want to play and then allowing WMP to use a playlist in a single command . The advantage is that we can now stop and start the play of the hook or hooks in a smooth manner, even if you want to interrupt a hook while it plays. Technically, it was difficult. Today, it was easy.

Alternate to Hook Files

If you don’t supply hook files, remember you can always launch the song’s YouTube video instead. The advantage of the hook is the ability to hear what the respondents heard. You might decide that a given hook was not the best representation of the song. That could in some cases explain a low score or high unfamiliarity.

I like the video link. Working in so many countries and formats, I always review the top testing and most centered songs. That helps keep me up to date on the music that matters most.