GLBasic and the NOOK

[Millerszone]

Is GLBasic compatible with the NOOK?
It uses Android OS, so I guess it should be.

https://nookdeveloper.barnesandnoble.com/

[Kitty Hello]

Yes, should work.

[ggindlesperger]

Has this been tested? I also use Corona SDK and in their case Android builds do not work on Nook as the Nook Android is modified (what Android isn't anymore). I do not have a Nook yet to test it. Have not even received my developer approval from them yet.

[ketil]

There are rumors that Google will accept less (to none) modifications in the core code of android by phone manufacturers in the future.
I certainly hope it's true...

[Wampus]

I tried to register as a Nook Developer today. Currently its quite troublesome to do that if you live outside the US. I imagine it will take at least a couple of support requests and a fair wait before I'm ready to get going.

Has anyone successfully tested GLBasic with the Nook yet? Imagine its fairly slow, no?

[Wampus]

OK! Almost forget to update this thread.

I have a Nook Color and GLBasic apps work on it. They work and soon I'll find out if Barnes and Noble will accept apps built in GLBasic. I don't see why not but who knows.

What you should know about developing for Nook: -

Pretty much the exact same sound issues that plague the Kindle Fire are also present with the Nook Color. For example, playing music with PLAYMUSIC tends to slow everything down and results in choppy/slower performance. Unlike with the Kindle Fire it almost always causes a problem unless your app is not graphically intensive at all. Tracker music works better and I recommend using that. In addition to music playback issues using WAVs with certain bit-rates, resolutions and channels won't work. You will need / would need to play around to make sure all is good. Perhaps the strangest thing is that GLBasic apps (and possibly all apps on the Nook Color from my experience) are capped at a refresh rate of 30FPS. No matter how undemanding the app I can't get it to update at over 30FPS. On the other hand it seems to be able to take a lot of graphically intense work before it drops a frame below 30FPS. The Nook Tablet might be a lot better so if you want to make apps for the Nook(s) make sure your app can detect the refresh rate and adjust itself accordingly. <-- (Although slow at 45 to 30 FPS there is no 30FPS cap. That was an adaptive frame skipping routine I wrote kicking in to make the refresh rate even. I thought I'd disabled it but no)

As far as the developer process goes be prepared for some odd bureaucracy and complicated hoops to jump through. Barnes and Noble clearly want developers, even non-US based developers, but you'll need some patience to get started, a good deal of which will go on getting your Win/Mac/Linux setup to work with installing Android apps via the ADB method. If you don't know what the ADB method is then trust me, it will be at least an hour to get working unless you're a WinXP person.

[erico]

I guess those e-book tablet guys can´t have people using those gadgets for everything from games to music?
Maybe things are hard coded/chiped that way?
Anyway how about loading music in chunks? would it help?

win xp? what is that?

Hope it all goes fine, modules will always save the day, such a marvelous thing.

edit: wasn´t there a recent thread about a mod player that could be implemented? how is that going?

[Wampus]

I'm not sure how I could cache MP3 or OGG music so loading in chunks is beyond me. I'm sure it would help, though. I strongly suspect the reason tracker music works so much smoother is that the entire file is loaded into RAM before it plays.

In terms of potential tracker routines the FMOD route is too expensive. Mikmod is much more promising since its open source and already ported to many platforms. If it wasn't working for Android devices already I would have simply removed music altogether in PowFish for the Nook Color.

The only trouble with tracker music is making the best use of it is as much a technical feat as a musical one. For example, the musician I use is learning how to write tracker music atm. For her first attempt she wanted decent piano samples to work with. She's accustomed to classical instruments and high quality digital instruments so what little she could find offered as simple piano samples didn't interest her. I had to record, re-sample and set up an impulse tracker instrument with many different samples covering each octave before the quality began to sound somewhat acceptable to her. After her first attempt the result wouldn't play properly because the mikmod player routine is different to that of the tracker she used to write the music. The file size was getting close to 4 meg. Now, I can reduce the file size a great deal and fix the compatibility issues but the point is that something that would've taken 1/2 hour in most music creation tools took a lot longer because of the technical difficulties of creating tracker music.

[erico]

I believe.

A tracker usually pitch bend a sound to get other notes/tones.
Musicians are not kind to this, unless they are old school and had played with trackers back on the st/amiga era.

So you have to have a new sample every octave I guess.

I did something like 5 years piano class when kid till the point of composing things.
I was amazed by trackers back then too.

I would not bother the difference in quality too much considering the music file gets smaller and can be played on more devices. Otherwise I never listen to mp3 as a good conversion renders the file big too. A proper WAV file 24bit 128khz is also huge and there is no reason for that if you don´t have a professional mix+sound box. What usually is not inside the target platforms. But that is just my opinion.

I suggest you may show her the results played on the final device speakers, it may help reach an understandment in quality compromises. Other then that, don´t discuss with a musician, do as she says!

[Wampus]

Heh. I will do as she says. She does seem to be getting into tracker music now but she's asking if its possible to have event triggered changes in real-time music. In theory that's definitely possible. In practice something better than mikmod would be needed. 

I've just found that tracker music on the Nook Color can be as bad as MP3 in causing jitters if the number of channels used is high. In fact its even worse than MP3 playback if a track uses 28-32 channels. In that case some samples won't play or play in the wrong order. Gah. I'm going to try reducing the bit-rate of an MP3 to see if that helps but the way its looking it would be better just not to include music for the Nook Color. On the bright side the Nook Color is right at the lowest end of Android tablets when it comes to CPU power. Things could be worse. 

[erico]

oh my...how can it be such a device is flawed on the music side?

Is it a nook problem? their android version problem? glbasic problem?

[Wampus]

Its principally an Android problem with the sound library which can get particularly bad with slower CPUs. Whether its GLBasic or another 'create once, publish everywhere' solution, the same delays and other difficulties crop up. With older gen Android devices its a case of having to work around it I guess.

[fuzzy70]

Trackers & conventional music creating programs have the same common problem, i.e the more channels you have the higher the CPU & disk usage required. When trackers came out they filled a gap in producing music for games etc that at the time would otherwise be impossible without loads of outboard gear like synths & so on.

Basically a tracker is nothing more than a midi player & the samples are the instuments, due to the way the instruments change pitch causes problems with certain types. To play an sample 1 octave higher it just plays the sample at twice the speed & likewise 1 octave lower half the speed, the down side is if you double the speed the sample lasts half as long so if you wanted to sustain that note your pretty much screwed. Also differing the speed of the sample playback has other side effects like you lose the attack of the original, any reverb/vibrato etc is played back at a different rate as well. Some instruments are better suited for use in trackers like drums or any short duration type, longer duration ones work well if they are used in a limited range of notes where the speed/duration is less noticable.

While synths & plugins like VST's use samples they are stored in small compressed chunks covering a wider range & have a separate attack/sustain table so the problems of the tracker type samples are far less noticeable.

I am excluding programs like the Ejay series etc as they are mainly just sample players where the samples are complete drum loops, basslines etc just strung together to make a complete song. Some do have some form of single note playback that you can sequence but not all.

Basically the more samples requires more ram or fast disk access & very little cpu hit, whereas mp3/ogg requires less ram/disk access but more cpu usage for decompression. Neither of which are ideal & it is just a case of seeing what works best on the targeted platform.

Lee 

[erico]

Great explanation!

Also, when I mentioned chunks up there, I meant to divide the music in loop parts an go on loading them as needed.
ps: wild guess, I doubt it could work..

[Wampus]

Thanks Lee. Makes sense of things.

I'm going to simply remove the music for Nook Color. That works best for that particular platform. It easy enough for players to turn off the music yet I believe selling somebody something with features that don't work well (i.e. the music) is worse than leaving the problematic features left out.