Minim

Egged on by the Processing 1.0 team, I spent today putting together a new release of Minim, which had been languishing on my computer. The lion’s share of the work was simply updating the examples and then uploading them. I really need to automate that process, it’s a big pain. Still not done: updating the manual.

A very important change to be aware of if you are upgrading, is that the Minim class is now instantiable. All of the load and get methods have been changed to regular old member functions, rather than static on the class. The static start(PApplet) method has been removed, you must now pass your sketch into the constructor, like so:

Minim minim = new Minim(this);
AudioPlayer player = minim.loadFile("blah.wav");

A very cool addition is getMetaData() for AudioPlayer, AudioSnippet, and AudioSample. The ability to read the ID3 tags from mp3 files was always there in the package I use for playing those, but I didn’t hook it up initially. Now all the tags you probably care about get stuffed into an AudioMetaData object when you load a file. Check out the online example.

An interesting implementation change is that I’ve broken out the Javasound specific code from the generic audio abstraction layer code. This means that there is now a package called ddf.minim.spi, which defines a bunch of interfaces that Minim uses to load files and acquire inputs and outputs. The key interface is MinimServiceProvider, which looks a lot like a slimmed down version of Minim’s interface. It is now possible for you implement MinimServiceProvider and then pass an instance of your implementation into the Minim constructor. Minim will use your implementation for all audio resource acquisition. This means that the default implementation, which uses Javasound, does exactly that and lives in jsminim.jar, which is included with the distro. One of the reasons that I did this was so that I could easily write an implementation of Minim that uses an FModEx Java binding. Work has begun on that, but it is not yet finished. Still, something to look forward to!

I’m very happy to announce the release of Minim 1.1!

If you’ve been using Minim 1.0, there are some important changes you need to be aware of:

• AudioFileIn is now AudioPlayer.
• AudioClip is now AudioSnippet.
• To get an AudioSnippet you use Minim.loadSnippet(String).
• AudioFileOut is now AudioRecorder.
• To get an AudioRecorder you use Minim.createRecorder(Recordable, String, boolean)
• Additionally, the methods of AudioRecorder are ever so slightly different than those of AudioFileIn.

Another major change from 1.0 is the inclusion of a bunch of Interfaces that define library functionality. Essentially what I’ve done is defined how everything in the library should behave and then written an implementation of that spec. This is why createRecorder takes Recordable as the first argument and not an AudioInput or other concrete class. The use of Interfaces shouldn’t break any of your existing code because I used the existing methods of Minim as the starting point for the Interfaces.

I fixed a host of bugs relating to mp3 playback for this release. They should behave exactly like WAV and AU files now. There are many more examples now, one for each method of each Interface that defines the functionality of Minim classes. Examples are organized by Interface, rather than by concrete class, hopefully this isn’t too confusing for people.

Please let me know if you have any problems or questions!