07-21-2019, 09:33 AM
Mike,
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
I agree that AIDL is overkill and too much reliance would be placed on the quality of the plugins.
I've recently moved my iRealPro code onto android and am now happily synchronising playlists directly to your database. I've utilised irealcvt inside a Termux environment to generate the images and Tasker as the glue between the applications - an export from iRealPro lands me in MS with an updated Collection that matches my playlist, including Keys, Composers, Style, Tempo and some MIDI commands. This is working well without an API and the database interaction is likely too complicated for one. I'll have to live with database version changes.
However, another application that I'm porting needs a lot more configuration for each song and there isn't the wiggle room in your database to squeeze in my data. That's not a problem but I'll need to write a separate app and the interaction between the apps won't be pretty. I'd love to be able to quickly switch from one to the other maintaining state.
How about using Android Activities? A few published Activities inside MS would allow the app to be opened straight to a Song, Collection etc. Being able to broadcast calls to Activities from Smart Buttons or on receipt of MIDI commands would allow connections to all number of other apps. To be able to talk to anything from MS I'm currently limited to MIDI, a file export or a URL. Whilst it's possible to declare Intents to receive the latter two, a broadcast activity with arguments filled by variable expansion would be significantly cleaner and more flexible. As I said before, connection to Tasker and other automation tools opens up all sorts of possibilities and this would be a first step.
I'm about to start on the MIDI part of this project and wondered whether your implementation of Google MIDI connections is limited to USB and BTLE or do you allow inter-app software routing. I guess I'll find out soon enough.
Kind regards,
Terry.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
I agree that AIDL is overkill and too much reliance would be placed on the quality of the plugins.
I've recently moved my iRealPro code onto android and am now happily synchronising playlists directly to your database. I've utilised irealcvt inside a Termux environment to generate the images and Tasker as the glue between the applications - an export from iRealPro lands me in MS with an updated Collection that matches my playlist, including Keys, Composers, Style, Tempo and some MIDI commands. This is working well without an API and the database interaction is likely too complicated for one. I'll have to live with database version changes.
However, another application that I'm porting needs a lot more configuration for each song and there isn't the wiggle room in your database to squeeze in my data. That's not a problem but I'll need to write a separate app and the interaction between the apps won't be pretty. I'd love to be able to quickly switch from one to the other maintaining state.
How about using Android Activities? A few published Activities inside MS would allow the app to be opened straight to a Song, Collection etc. Being able to broadcast calls to Activities from Smart Buttons or on receipt of MIDI commands would allow connections to all number of other apps. To be able to talk to anything from MS I'm currently limited to MIDI, a file export or a URL. Whilst it's possible to declare Intents to receive the latter two, a broadcast activity with arguments filled by variable expansion would be significantly cleaner and more flexible. As I said before, connection to Tasker and other automation tools opens up all sorts of possibilities and this would be a first step.
I'm about to start on the MIDI part of this project and wondered whether your implementation of Google MIDI connections is limited to USB and BTLE or do you allow inter-app software routing. I guess I'll find out soon enough.
Kind regards,
Terry.