7/1/10 Daily Journal of AT

First day of July, and I feel like we're getting things done. (Which is good, since we're nearing the end of week 5.)

Started today by working with BeatFinder to speed it up. Since there was no way I could get the file reading to go any faster, I started playing with different ways to pass the data from FFT to BeatFinder. I ended up re-writing BeatFinder as a class, with accessors, that was given each miniwave FFT data as it was read. After all the FFTs were done, it runs itself to get the beats. If, for some reason, this is done when there is no FFT data, it gets beat information directly from the file (as it did in the original function from the begining of the week).

While I was working in WaveSplitter (which is where FFT, PeakFinder, and BeatFinder are all called) I realized that we didn't need to create miniwave files and save them to disk. Instead, the miniwaves are passed directly to FFT, without writing them to the disk. This nearly halfs the time when running large files, which is great, but makes us unable to run a single FFT on a given second. If there's time, we'll work on getting just the data at that second to find a single FFT, or we'll just abandon it (as it's not terribly important except as a check or as a curiosity).

This afternoon was less interesting, as I've been testing various variables in the BeatFinder in order to better find beats. So far, I've gotten fairly reliable data concerning bass beats, although low notes from non-drums are also included, and vocal sound can throw it off. Tomorrow is more work on that, and I hope to have it working reliably soon.