Groovebox
I spent the weekend thinking about the groovebox. I threw together some sample designs for it – one using a Jtable and another using checkboxes. The checkboxes would work well, but it would involve creating 64 checkboxes (16 instruments x 4 bars (with 4 beats per bar)), which gave me 1500 lines of code before I even began to code any of the complicated stuff. So I dont think Ill end up using checkboxes. The Jtable works a lot better lines of code wise, but is quite tricky to use. I spent half of today trying to get a cell to change colour on a mouse click, and in the end I just gave up. The problem is that the cellRenderer() method is part of the column class, so Jtable is more geared towards editing entire coolumns at once, rather than individual cells. I did manage to change the colour while it was selected, but the colour changed back to white once a different cell was selected. Ill have a look at this again later in the week.
On the Matlab side of things I wrote a nice method that will take 2 samples as parameters and add the smaller of the samples on top of the lafrger one. This will be useful for when more than one instrument is to be played at once – ie, when more than one cell in a column is selected.
Im going to find some decent samples for the instruments soon and try and normalise their lengths as much as possible to ensure that they keep in time with eachother.
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