Anna’s Status Report for 04/08

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week (12+ hours).  

Sadly, this week we did not make as much progress as we would have liked. We began the week by having our interim demo, which went well overall. We had communication between audio recording in the front end, with pitch detection in the backend. We also had demonstrations of how we would like our game to look eventually. However, the largest missing piece of our project was, and still is, the fact that we are unable to correctly read wav files passed in from JavaScript in our python context.

Kelly identified that the wav files, as read and saved in python, are distorted, basically sounding like noise. However, we are able to render our wav recordings in JavaScript, where they sound exactly as they should. This leads us to believe that the issue is with how we read the bitstream that gets passed to the Django backend. We have tried exploring two main avenues to get around this:

1. We have continued to research how to correctly read the file passed in. We may have issues with the riff header, or are in some way sampling at a rate that is not processable. We have had a hard time finding examples of dealing with this correctly. Making this method work may require adjusting how we configure the media stream.
2. We have considered saving the file to the server within the JavaScript. This method is not available in the MediaStream Recorder module we are using, but an “exportWav” method is available in Recorder.JS. This is a simpler, no longer maintained api for creating audio recordings with JavaScript. This is not ideal, as there are fewer options, resources, and there are things that may simply no longer work since it is no longer maintained. While this remains an option, our team would really prefer to not redo our whole recording configuration.

We have had trouble finding literature on this, so dealing with these file formats has been all I have been able to do this week. I reached out to Kelly and I’s former Web Applications professor, and we hope to be able to get some advice or guidance. So far, he has recommended sub-processes. We have begun researching them, but are unsure if they will help us deal with our issue.

Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?  

We are behind schedule. We were hoping to finish audio integration this week, but were not able to. We have a couple avenues to keep exploring, and we may cut into slack while trying to figure this out.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

I hope to finish backend frontend integration next week. If there is extra time, I want to add the after game feedback screen, or more song options. However, those are not top priority.