Relatively Early Development

Signal Chains Beta

2010-01-28T00:00:00-08:00

Relatively Early has been working on Signal Chains for a few months, and are finally somewhat ready for the public to see it.

The Problem: Audio gear is expensive. Few brick and mortar stores carry expensive audio gear and will let you get your grubby little hands all over it before purchasing. Conversely, when people post audio samples online, you’re not always sure what is involved. Is it really that mic that sounds that way? Or is the preamp they’re using coloring the sound?

The Solution: Signal Chains is essentially a way for audio engineers (or those who call themselves audio engineers) to share their signal flows through audio samples, documenting each piece and process involved. It does this by providing a somewhat standardized method of doing so.

The Pieces

Gear

The building blocks of Signal Chains. The tools that real engineers use to accomplish the sound they have in their head. Gear can be added by anyone, but and emphasis has been put on search in order to avoid duplicate entries. Gear can be added straight from the gear type page or on the fly during chain creation. When browsing mics, for example, I can select Condenser from “Type”. Doing this shows me only condenser mics in the database.

If I want to further narrow my search, I can enter AKG in “Make”. At the moment, there is only one AKG Condenser in the database (let’s change that!), so the C414 is listed. Alternatively, if I don’t find the AKG Condenser I’m looking for, I can add it by clicking the New Mic button. Doing this will over time build a large database of audio gear, with which we can take over the world.

Viewing a gear page gives you a list of chains that gear is involved in, allowing you to hear it in different scenarios.

Chains

The heart of Signal Chains is, of course, the chain. A chain is involves the following:

An input source — Microphone or Line Input
A preamp
Optional extra gear — Dynamics Processors, Equalizers, Effects Processors, and Converters
A 30 second audio sample of the recorded audio
Optional (but encouraged) notes about all gear used in the process.

The gear is displayed in a virtual rack where it can be reordered with drag-and-drop ease. Notes are displayed in the rack, and the individual gear’s pages can be accessed easily. Gear is added one item at a time to encourage thorough explanation of each piece. Chains can be tagged with terms for search purposes. At the moment, I’m using them to label what instrument is being recorded.

Users can Like and Comment on chains, hopefully fostering a community environment and further discussion about the process involved. Likes are virtual pats on the back, while Comments are a way to make it known to the public that you are far superior to the user who created the subject content. You know, just like anywhere else on the internet.

Audio

Arguably the most important piece of a chain is the audio. Nobody cares that you used all this expensive (or inexpensive) gear unless they can hear what it sounds like. This is why a chain requires an audio sample. Samples can be up to 30 seconds and need to be in some high-quality format (AIFF or WAV). Once you upload the sample, Signal Chains converts it down to MP3 and OGG formats and provides a nice little inline audio player for quick listening. The high quality audio is provided for more detailed analysis if someone chooses to download it.

Users

In order to take full advantage of Signal Chains, one is required to become a user. Users, as if by some magical super power acquisition, gain the ability to create chains and gear, comment on and like chains and gear, and follow other users. That’s right, we’re doing the whole Twitter relationship thing. A user has their own dashboard populated with activity from people they follow. It’s a quick and easy way to make sure your friends aren’t doing anything better than you.

The Nerdery

Signal Chains is a Ruby on Rails app developed by Relatively Early Development for ourselves, and is a testimony to what we can accomplish. We’re excited to see how it is received by the public.

For now, you can follow @signalchains on Twitter for updates. If you’ve got some feedback for us, go crazy on our support site. If you’re interested in advertising on the site, contact us at info(at)relativelyearly.com.

Rails Rumble '09

2009-08-24T00:00:00-07:00

We once again participated in Rails Rumble, the annual 48-hour Ruby on Rails development contest. The fruits of our near-sleepless labor is Operator, a multi-user phone forwarding and voicemail service.

Cake

The idea grew from our personal need for one phone number to route to both of our phones. We wanted to be able to schedule times when calls would be routed to either phone. On top of that we thought it was necessary to have a central voicemail box. If no one answers a phone call or no one is scheduled to be on call, the call is directed to voicemail.

Calls needed to be able to have comments, so we could keep track of what we had followed up on or any other information associated with them.

Icing

The voicemail messages are sent to Operator and transcribed to readable, editable, searchable text. Inline audio players allow you to listen to the message, or you can listen to all visible messages via the answering machine at the top of each page.

We also included drag-and-drop tagging and responsibility assignment. The search feature allows for some handy sorting, and you can save a search as a filter for one-click access to it later.

Due to the nature of the contest, we had to present Operator in a limited way. Visitors have anonymous guest access to post comments, make tags, assign responsibilities, and edit transcriptions. Since the on-call scheduler actually works, guests can view the schedule page but not actually save the changes. We’d rather not receive a bunch of test calls this week. We also thought it was important to mask the incoming phone numbers in order to respect the privacy of anyone wanting to test calls out.

In the future, we plan to implement a sign up process, adding team members, acquiring a phone number, and all that important mumbo jumbo. For now you can consider it the internet’s finest prank message repository, or a chance to anonymously spill the beans.

Post-mortem

This is our second year participating in the Rails Rumble. We learned some lessons last year that made our experience much better. There were some other things that we stumbled upon this year that also helped out.

Plan up front

During last year’s competition, we had to take some time to go over our vision for the app because we were both envisioning different things. This year, we spent some time the week before drawing out wireframes and planning features. Our weekend went much more smoothly since we knew what needed to be done.

Clear out your schedule

Last year, both of us had commitments over the weekend. This took time away from building our application. This year we could spend as much time as necessary to make it as perfect as possible.

Finish early

Plan to have your application finished two hours in advance. Then you can spend the rest of the time looking for bugs. We had a few big bugs left in last years application; we caught several before our final submission this year.

Work with others

All of the Kansas City teams (at least all that we knew about) worked out of ECJC over the weekend. This provided several benefits: fewer distractions (everyone present is working on something), motivation, and the ability to bounce problems off of each other.

New Website

2009-08-11T00:00:00-07:00

Here at Relatively Early Development, we’ve been hard at work for the last couple of days and are pleased to present our new site. To show you how far the design has come, here is a preliminary sketch we did on our whiteboard:

The logo is as large as we felt we could make it in order to build our brand. We have a block of ads (including an auto-playing video) in the middle to increase our revenue stream. Next to the ads is our blog, because blogs are important for building a relationship with our clients. We had to sacrifice a bit on width to make room for ads, but we felt it was a good compromise. At the bottom, in order to keep our visitors entertained, we embedded an episode of Lost from Hulu and some background music. There is a video of one of us at the bottom of the right telling the visitor what kind of opportunities we offer. Above that is a link to our twitter and facebook pages (coming soon). Along the right margin is a stream of twitter updates about us.

When fleshed out, this version of the site didn’t work as well as we would have liked. The first thing to go was anything that moved or made sound when the page was loaded. Next, we took out the ads to make room for the blog. Then we removed the social networking features. We don’t have time for that kind of thing.

Now that the page was stripped of everything but the blog, we started adding in other important features, like a portfolio. We felt that it was important for potential clients to be able to see the kind of work we do.

In all seriousness

We took this opportunity to try out a few technologies that were new to us. This website is built using Jekyll and is pushed up to our GitHub Pages repo. Our branding is the handy work of A. Micah Smith, a.k.a My Associate Cornelius. The preferred font for headlines is Rockwell. Those who have Rockwell installed will be greeted with its wonderful slabby goodness. For those who do not and are using a browser that supports the CSS3 @font-face rule, we’re using Kernest to embed the somewhat similar Chunk typeface. Browsers without @font-face support get Courier. I’m sorry. The portfolio tickers use jQuery Tools Scrollable.

To celebrate the launch of the new website, we’ve made it open source.