blog: AI (almost) created a MIDI information plugin

[nikos]

here's the comment area for today's blog post found at:
www.zabkat.com/blog/vibe-midi-details-wdx.htm

[Kilmatead]

Back in 1985 a man stood on a stage in a small college town in America and spoke into a microphone reciting three words: "Eye, ear, toe" while pointing at each of his body-parts in turn. "That's my name!" announced the great Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira, with an equally great laugh.

"And over there," he said, pointing to a silhouetted figure in shadow who was adjusting his guitar-strap and tossing his poney-tail off his shoulder, "that's Albert." Smiling a surprisingly shy grin, Al Di Meola waved to the audience as the lights came up to see him surrounded by a plethora of guitars - and somewhat out of place for a jazz venue (certainly 40 years ago) - a small computer terminal.

This was my introduction at age 17 to the world of the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and Al was touring for his two-man album Cielo e Terra, a quiet introspective turn from his usual raucous and flamboyant musical stylings.

Instead of just jumping into the music, he sat down and explained to the audience what he was doing, blending mic'd acoustic and electric Paul Reed Smith guitars (the most beautiful things ever made - after Audrey Hepburn, that is).

Playing with each in turn, sometimes fiddling with dials and a PC keyboard, bringing forth the quiet, unearthly, and etherial sounds we take for granted today - and almost dismiss as mere ambient-musings - but this was a man applying his talent and curiosity to a new toybox, embracing an age with care and attention. He understood that subtlety can be the strongest weapon in an arsenal, and that while people often delight in the speed and majesty of the virtuosic voyeurism they came to see, a little communication can go a long way to winning over an audience already mired into an age of electronic musics.

One of the few truly entrancing evenings of my life, and I remember every moment of it.

Curiously, were you to enquire of an A.I. the meaning of the word Musicae it would most likely respond with something cold and analytical like:

"The numerical value of Musicae in Pythagorean Numerology is eight".

But I know it's more than that, and that's why all my plugins are made with human thought, human effort, and, indeed, are subject to the same human foibles and mistakes of any squirrel flubbing a great leap from one tree shroud far above the forest floor to another, falling in disgrace on occasion. Grand ambitions sometimes end in a sheepish grin of resilience obscuring the aches and pains of growth behind the silhouette of creation, all spent in earnest while we return quietly to forever.

Even those of the vibe-coding pretenders.

[Kilmatead]

Part 2: The boring serious stuff...

Was the title of your blog-post meant to be "AI (almost) crated a..." or "(almost) created"? Weirdly, it works both ways!

Somewhat off-topic...

Any reasonable programmer would cache the information and wait for a property request on the same file.

Forgetting, for the moment that I didn't learn programming in university (I learned at home as a child from bits and pieces of the few books I could scrape together), so there are a few "gaps" in my approach to things... for example, I couldn't write a sorting algorithm from scratch if you held a gun to my head - but despite that, I get by (for a gardener who pushes a lawn-mower for a living). But I wouldn't claim to ever be an aspiring "reasonable" programmer by any means. Who wants to be "reasonable" anyway? That ain't me, man, that ain't me! Topple the system! Hang the rich! Ya-da-yada-ya.

So, having myself recently spent a lot of time playing around with an overly-complex (but working!) method of hashing pathnames and speedily placing structured data in a direct-to-table approach (instead of just iterating a list), what method could you suggest to do this in a simple and fast way (without too many collisions)? I mean, if you take into account the amount of browsing done in any single session of x2, one could easily extract the properties of tens of thousands of files/folders, each of which would need to be cached in as small and simple way as possible, without resorting to storing (and comparing) whole textual paths?

Maybe a blog on that next week, eh? Working title: "Crating & Creating a Hash of Things!"

[nikos]

xplorer2 caches this information anyway, but the plugin should at least remember the last file it examined (eg with TLS). Easy and effective, in case multiple MIDI properties are requested for the same file. I am 99% certain the listview control asks for columns one at a time, then switches to the next file

[Kilmatead]

Oh... I thought you intimated something slightly more meaty than just the store-brand of puppy-chow. Even pretentious gits like myself can rise to that low-bar of "reasonable coding competency".

Certainly with this one, saving the repeated fseek's alone would probably buy you enough time to think up a proper way to abandon the use of tchar's - sheesh! Speaking of 1985! I had to look up what _sntprintf macro nonsense was - as the "obvious" answer was just too terrifying to imagine, yet it was true. Oh, the weeping!

* And you changed the blog-thread title! Boo hiss! The old one had unintentional comedic class!

* And you even forgot to give the dll a version resource, after all the hullabaloo you made announcing that 6.0.0.2 could extract such info from WDX's. (Something that only us two care about, of course, but still!) The Gods (and the Devils!) are in the details.

[nikos]

fertile ground for itchy green hands, if any
i just wanted to reaffirm my belief (hope) in AIs eternal incompetence

[Kilmatead]

You know, for a day that I'm actually supposed to be working (my boss doesn't know what the internet is), I seem to do an awful lot of typing. I must be the only gardener in the world who absolutely hates Springtime. Growth and life and shite! It's disgusting! All this work just so other people can "appreciate nature in their surroundings". Ugh. I imagine there must be a Japanese monk from days of yore who ranted like this, too. It's very Buddhist in its own way.

i just wanted to reaffirm my belief (hope)... in eternal incompetence

Actually it sounds like the opposite is true, as time goes on. You're quite the inadvertent and reluctant cheerleader. Well, this blog at least, despite its superficial negativity certainly gives an opposing impression of embracing your own fears. Know thy enemy?

By the way, I have a very strong and fervent belief in eternal incompetence, never mind the AI stuff. Just thought I'd clarify that. I'm a broad thinker, me.

Aside, if there's anyone (who isn't descended from Vercingetorix!) who can present a cogent and legitimate case for the value of this plugin, I might be persuaded to clean it up with my fertile little fingers - but as there's two weeks of Snooker on telly, for the next fortnight I'm gonna imbibe and espouse nothin' but lazy lazy couch-potato goodness.