Weekend Hacking

I had a lot to do this weekend and decided to do none of it, and instead ported sfxr to Cocoa, with a native UI and proper save/load :) My version’s called cfxr (as in “Cocoa sfxr”) and is available at http://thirdcog.eu/apps/cfxr . I’m not saying it’s better than sfxr, only different and more native. If you’ve got a 10.5 Mac, check it out and let me know what you think :) It’s basically just an experiment to learn Core Data and Bindings (Thanks, Scott!), and a reason to make save/load work better on the Mac.

The sfxr code (more specifically, the sdl port), when I first saw it, seemed like the worst mess I’ve ever seen. Sure, it’s a quick hack, but not even keeping state in a struct? OMG. But after working with this code for a weekend, it’s surprisingly good for what it is! “Porting” it to Cocoa was as easy as finding out which globals were properties of the sound (that is, attributes), and adding “sound.” before all accesses to those, and #defining objc syntax as C syntax for the four major playback methods. I guess I could’ve #defined the sound attribute accesses as well, making an upgrade as easy as a copy-paste, but I felt I had already done enough code generation for one day :P (Check out the legacyAccessors.m in the source to see what I mean :P Not very good looking code but it got the job done.)

It’s a rough 0.1 and might need some work. I was also thinking about making the playback part an AudioUnit or VST (just for fun) to make the playback more flexible. It works pretty nice as it is though, so do check it out :)