[Clam-devel] Demo today report

[Xavier Amatriain]

My presentation/demo today went pretty well. I even ventured into coding 
a new Processing class
and letting the audience decide what they wanted to implement (a Ring 
Modulator). A couple of
issues came up, though, when doing this.

1) The very long linking times made this not as dynamic as I had hoped. 
I am wondering now
whether in my laptop I have the issue with binutils that I reported 
before on the list and documented
in my blog:

http://technocalifornia.blogspot.com/2007/04/slow-linking-times-in-your-latest-linux.html

2) When I added the new processing in the NetworkEditor I could not 
connect the ports! This
is new to me, I have done this many times before and never experienced 
that behavior. Maybe
it was a silly coding mistake but everything was pretty straightforward 
(Audio ports). I will look
into the code on Monday but maybe somebody has some idea what might have 
gone wrong.

Many people in the audience had tried to approach CLAM before and found 
that what I did
looked much easier than what they encountered on the web: the amount of 
documentation scares
people away! One of my students even said that he thought that a 40+ 
hour tutorial was needed
to use CLAM (the infamous old tutorial that is still pretty visible on 
the web).

We should really stress the workflow and recommend the following approach
to learning CLAM:

1. Do NetworkEditor tutorial in the wiki
2. Do the Processing creation tutorials on the wiki (I would merge the 
three we have: simple,
controls, and configurations into a single one with "optional" sections)

- At this point you are ready to go

But if you want more:

a) Inside look into spectral processing:

a.1. Do the SMSTools tutorial
a.2. Only if you really want to get more insight and have a lot of time 
do the 40+ hour tutorial

b) Information on descriptors or using CLAM as an MIR tool:

b.1. Do the Annotator tutorial

c) Use CLAM for something different (MIDI, synthesis...)

c.1. Look at the other network examples for NetworkEditor
c.2. Look into the simpler examples in the CLAM repo