What’s Working?
This week, we have made progress on file uploads, as well as measurements of latency and packet loss. Per Jackson’s status report, latency and packet loss measurements are promising, but they are no good to interpret without cloud deployment working yet. Locally, communicating between browsers, latency is around 5ms, and packet loss is almost constantly 0%. These are likely just the overhead from WebRTC, and will start to get a lot worse when you add in the factor of network speed. Still, it’s helpful to have these measurements working, so they can be interpreted as soon as cloud deployment does work. Only then can we really say if we need to use other means to improve latency (e.g. downsampling the audio being sent).
Risks & Management
Our biggest risk right now is not having enough time to finish everything we planned. With cloud deployment not yet started, and no DAW interface, we likely will not be able to get them both working perfectly by the end of the class. Since our project’s main purpose is to facilitate musical collaboration, cloud deployment is absolutely essential. Therefore, any time allocated for the DAW UI may have to be reallocated to cloud deployment until that’s working. We will likely have to all work on these tasks, replacing our initial division of labor proposed in the design review.
Another risk we have is exporting the recordings into a readable file format for processing and saving. We previously had not considered compatibility with different browsers; the common file formats are not natively supported (.wav, .mp3), so we’d have to do this conversion ourselves. If conversion doesn’t work, there is a different recording implementation that has a function built in for us to convert to .wav files. However, integrating that one could likely break some of the features we already have and likely cost us more labor.
Changes to System Design & Schedule
As of now, no system design changes to report.
While we haven’t finalized any of the changes mentioned above, we will likely have significant changes this week when we make our updated Gantt chart for the interim demo on Wednesday. One option would be to put the rest of our focus on cloud deployment and getting monitoring latency down as much as possible between two remote clients. This way, even if the DAW UI isn’t finished, we will still have a low-latency audio chat site for musicians to practice, and hopefully record as well, even if editing is not a possibility.
Since cloud deployment and the DAW UI are not complete, we will have to cut into our slack time even more. Luckily, we planned for this, and we have the slack time available.