MakingMusic (1.1) is an online Musical Instrument Encyclopedia, providing a description, an image and a sound clip per instrument.

This is an ongoing Freeware (see below) project, with new instruments being added to the database as the research progresses. Each time you launch the application you may find you have access to different amounts of information. The aim of the project is to form a comprehensive database of musical instruments, the criteria being anything from any culture or any age that is used to make music. This may take some time! If you would like to submit an instrument to the database please email the details by using the link in the application 'Help' menu.

Requires Mac OS X 10.2 or higher with QuickTime 6 and Internet access on an iMac, iBook, PowerMac or PowerBook.

To install simply drag application icon to your applications folder.

Getting Started

To find an instrument scroll through the list on the left or type the name into the search box in the middle. Then simply double click your selection or press the 'Search' button to begin loading the instrument data.

Press the 'Listen' button to hear a sound sample of the instrument and the 'Speak' button to hear the entire or selected text. Check out the 'Preferences' to customize your settings.

Freeware

Software distributed under freeware license is copyright by David Ahmed. However, in the spirit of computing community, I do grant users of the software the right to share it freely with their family, friends & colleagues, provided this is not done for commercial gain. The software distributed in this way may represent work in progress, and bears no warranty, either expressed or implied.

Technical

This Cocoa application was written in Objective-C using the Apple Developer Tools on an iBook, design was done in Adobe Photoshop. In addition to this the following 3rd party frameworks were used:

CURLHandle by Dan Wood http://curlhandle.sourceforge.net

Speech Utilities by Raphael Sebbe http://membres.lycos.fr/raphaelsebbe/speech/speech.html

History

14/12/02	V 1.0 released

16/12/02	V 1.1, removed a small cache bug that occasionally caused the wrong 		sound to play

Copyright © 2002 by David Ahmed