ARCHITECTURE ASSESMENT

PRIDE

PRIDE
ARCHITECTURE ASSESMENT TEAM PRIDE Matthew Gill (NINJ4) Team Leader / GUI James Cancienne (Prestigious) Lead Designer / Queries Michael Courtney (Pirate) Odds and Ends / Queries James Lancaster III (J-Dogg) Testing / Queries Conducted by: Matthew Gill (NINJ4) Team Leader / GUI Overview -Mission Statement To unite different types of developers under a common goal. -PRIDEs Purpose The purpose of PRIDE is to allow users to catalog their music collections for easy reference, without the need for manual input such as track title, artist name, or album name. Additionally, it provides a searchable interface to easily navigate a users collection. -Summary Below one will find a broken down catalog of the inner workings of PRIDE. Simply put this document describes how PRIDE should work, and how to accomplish those goals. -Notes Throughout this document we appears quite frequently. This simply refers to Team PRIDE as a whole. Thank you. Mechanics -CD Query To ascertain disc information, we will use a win32functions class (a wrapper class defining many functions using System.Runtime.InteropServices) as well as many basic handlers. Also, common techniques allow us to calculate sector sizes as well as different types of sectors. This will be useful in determining which discs are audio CDs, and which discs are not audio CDs. Essentially, we will find the beginning and ending sectors on any given disc, then compare the space between them, as well as the type of under sampling, possible tracks, and channels. From this information, we can formulate the discs discid.

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-FreeDB PRIDE will be using an online music database similar to Gracenote. This CDDB (Compact Disc Data Base) will allow PRIDE to send a CDs discid (a unique information tag present on all licensed CDs) and retrieve track, album, and artist information. This information will be called from: freedb.freedb.org, specifically from /~cddb/cddb.cgi. Connection and retrieval information is similar to generic database calls, but specific information can be found at FreeDB.org. -Resident Database PRIDE would not be of much use without a way to save the information gathered from FreeDB.org. We will employ a local SQL database to store all gathered CD information, including song titles, album names, artist names, and genre. Access and modification to this local database will be achieved using typical SQL commands. -Manual Information Overrides (NOT YET EMPLOYEED) When first beginning PRIDE we were heavily concerned about music piracy. Despite the fact that illegally burned audio CDs retain the same discid as their originals therefore allowing PRIDE to interface with it and subsequently gather the same information, we decided not to allow automatic detection of common file tags (ID3) and file names. However, we understand that FreeDB is not flawless and that it may lack CDs that a user may own. For this we plan on implementing a form of manual input. However, it will be released separate from the final build as a patch or add-on. -Album Art (NOT YET EMPLOYEED) In prior meetings we discussed the addition of album art, possibly gathered from websites like amazon.com or allmusic.com. This would be similar to the FreeDB.org pull, just redirected to another directory. While we are not planning for this to be in the final build, we will certainly consider it for a future patch or add-on. -User Selected Themes (NOT YET EMPLOYEED) Before we had a solid idea about how PRIDE was going to look, we had pondered a while on the idea of users being able to import their own backgrounds. It is relatively easy to replace the current background with a different one; however, we wanted to make it even more customizable. For example, allowing the user to scale the image, tile the image, and possibly even rearranging the button layout.

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This will be thought about and deployed later in a patch or add-on. Interface The staple of PRIDE should be not only the mechanics behind the visual appeal, but the look-and-feel as well. An intuitive interface is paramount. -Backdrop As far as backdrops go, research and personal preferences have committed us to using a simple gradient. Pictures and otherwise distracting patterns are just that, distracting. If a gradient is not used, simple, contrasting colors would be appropriate. -Buttons For the final release we settled on the standard Windows system theme; however in a future patch or add-on we have plans to update and possibly replace them with customized buttons. -Menu and Menu Arrangements We will do our best to restrict all functions to one screen. With the exception of a preference dialog box and a manual information override window (NOT YET EMPLOYEED), all menus will reside on the same form.

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Final -Appreciation Again, thank you for reading this document. We are very proud of this project and are striving to make it the best it can be. -Contact Information PRIDE Team Leader, Matthew Gill (NINJ4) can be emailed at matthew.gill@selu.edu .