-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 2
Vision Statement
Concert is an online tool that allows users to work together through the sharing, organizing, and discussion of segments of audio recordings. Concert takes an intricate look at the unique problem of how to efficiently and effectively collaborate on digital audio. By breaking down the all-too-standard, yet way-too-vague paradigm of upload, observe, comment, Concert allows for users to look at media in a much more in depth way. By taking advantage of the working precedents of today’s social networks, Concert’s feel is second nature, familiar, and easy to pick up.
Our competition includes sites such as Soundcloud and Kompoz, which allow users to upload entire songs and individual tracks, respectively. Although both sites allow users to comment on these uploaded files (Soundcloud even allows commenting on specific times in an audio file), neither allow the organizing of individual segments of audio. As the Web continues to grow, complex applications arise, filing most any niche available. As stated, some competing software exist but they do not have the same abilities as Concert does. As the Web 2.0 community booms, people have realized that the Web is an extremely viable platform to perform many previously “in-person” jobs. Concert hits at different niche than its competitors by allowing users to share, tag, and comment audio recordings with other users of their choice.
Concert allows users to upload audio files to the system for future organization and collaboration. These files can only be seen by the user that uploaded them, unless shared with a user group. Once permissions on a file have been established – i.e. what groups the file can be accessed by – audio files can be tagged into segments. A tag (collection of segments) provides a label (textual naming) to make a groups of segments easily identifiable and organized, while also having individual labeled segments. Combined, these labels provide a comprehensible hierarchy for users to identify their audio through – something waveforms themselves could never do. One way we see users taking advantage of this is through the categorization of audio segments into projects or genres. The system will not impose any abstraction, but will instead allow the user to harness the power of Concert in ways specific to that user’s needs. Once a tag has been established within a user group, it can be commented on in a few different ways. Group members can comment on the tag as a whole or on an individual segment. A group member can also tag a segment multiple times or remove any of the tags from a segment.
As Concert is a product of a Rensselaer course, RPI has invested their resources as a university into its success. The reputation of a university is base strongly on the quality of students and the products that their students create. As professors, the professionals of Team Instructor have invested their time and effort into the teaching of Concert’s developers. The level of quality that the professors hold their students directly correlates to the level of quality of the final product, and thus, the quality of the project reflects back upon the professors. Also, as growing computer science professionals, the creators of Concert have a portfolio of applications they each have developed, with Concert being the most current. In the same way as the quality of the product affects Rensselaer and Team Instructor, the quality of Concert reflects upon the abilities and skills of the developers.
The risks involved in the development of this project are all centered around the implementation. We need to perform some heavy server-side manipulation of audio files, including the compression of audio segments for quick download. We will also need to generate and store waveform images for each uploaded audio file, so they can be quickly displayed on the page. An advanced Javascript interface will need to be implemented, allowing for the playhead to move in sync with audio playback, over the waveform. If we cannot find open source libraries or online documentation to help us implement some of these features into Concert, we will end up spending our time implementing the sub-technologies instead. After a successful implementation of Concert, the risk moves from the implementation to acquiring a solid user base. In the real world, the popularity of an application can be measured by how many actually use the application. Since Concert has been differentiated from its competition in a manner that mimics how productive collaboration would occur, we are confident that users would prefer our system over our competitors.