I'm so excited about what I am about to share with the Kompoz Army. And I am so grateful to Craig Steen for making this possible.

Craig has built and amazing piece of software for Windows users to upload Kompoz tracks directly from their PCs to Kompoz. It is fast, very reliable, and easy to use.  I am posting this here -- in the Kompoz Army group, and not within the general community blog (yet) -- because we would like for you guys to kick the tires first. Download the app and give it a try (Windows users only). If you find any bugs, or have suggestions for improvements, (or want to shower Craig with praise), post a reply here. All feedback appreciated.

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/5485046/Kompoz%20Konsole%20InstallerV02.zip

I'll have to fire up vmware later on and give it a whirl. :)

Let the beta testing begin!

I'll be trying this also... well done Craig

Yes forgot to add THANKS CRAIG!!!!

So far so good. I did some testing and it looks real nice so far.

Thanks everyone for the enthusiasm!

I hope it works out to be a useful tool - I'm pretty sure drummers (like me) will find it handy as you can upload lots of seps to multiple projects at the same time in a "fire and forget" kind of way.

I can't take all of the credit for this though - My business partner (and fiancée) JudeHarrison co wrote this with with me - and there was a lot of input and support on the Kompoz API from Raf too.

There are some very cool things going on under the hood here that Raf has put in place in the API - and I'm not going to steal his thunder - But maybe a "geek report" is in order at some point :)

Not the usual kind of collaboration that I get involved with on Kompoz (I didn't have to quantize anything :) ), but an exciting one!

Thanks again for taking the time to be guinea pigs on this !

Cheers,

C.

i shamefully admit a total lack of space.  sounds dreamy though.

I will chime in with a problem. Not all private projects that I created in the list show up. Private projects that I joined show fine.

One more I noticed is not all songs that were staff picks are showing up either.

Any basic operating system or hardware specs that should be considered here? I can load onto XP, Vista and 7 (was sort of planning on playing with it this weekend) but only cause I have a lot of crap laying around. I don't know if you want to get fancy and publish a basic system requirement...and please remember this is a dumb marketing guy talking not anyone who actually knows what he is talking about!

It works fine for me.  Great job. 

My day job includes installation programming.  This uploader probably needs the .NET Framework if you have a clean XP OS.  Not sure what version, but a clean XP system probably has to install the .NET Framework of some version as a prerequsite.  If it's written in C++ .NET, it would also need the vcredist package.  It looks like it might be written in C# or VB.NET to me.

Dan

Hi All,

Thanks again for jumping in to test!

We'll definitely add a minimum spec before it goes to a wider audience - it probably will be XP with SP3 and 2 Gb RAM or similar. It's not going to work on a Commodore 64 :) As spotted by Dan, it is written in C# and uses the .Net runtime which it should  install if it needs to. The assumption is that this would be installed on your DAW machine (so, pretty high spec anyway) so that you can upload right away at the end of your recording session.

The search results are limited to returning the 50 most recently modified projects (including the  My Projects link). So if you have more than 50 collabs including private projects, then they may not show in the list. The rationale being that as an "uploader", the search is intended to retrieve specific projects to upload to. This can be clarified in some sort of help documentation to support the release, but it would be good to know what you think.

Cory - if this isn't what you are seeing (and you can't find your projects when searching by project name)  then let us know and we'll do some digging.

This feedback is really valuable, so please keep it coming.

Onwards, Army!!

Running VMware with Windows 7 on my Mac, the installer detected that some necessary things were missing in order to run. The .NET Framework was downloaded and installed automatically. I may have been missing other stuff. In any case Windows corrected the matter and proceeded. Everything went as intended.

While tinkering with it, the cursor would garble the GUI wherever it went. This is probably something on my end, and otherwise seemed to function as intended. If this GUI Garble occurs with someone else I will be happy to continue testing. Overall, it seems to work as well as a Windows program can.

It was fun to take a peek, even as I will likely have no need for it. I will now suspend this venture into the dark side and take a shower. 

Seriously, nice work Craig. 

Commodore 64...how did you know I have one of those in my boneyard too? Hate to say I am old enough to have owned one and an Atari 800 before that which had to be program in straight machine language loaded from small magnetic tape cassettes requiring something like a hundred lines of code to produce a lovely blue pixel on the top right of the screen.

A few thousand more lines of machine code and viola...Packman.

Hi Brannon - thanks for taking the time to test this - especially on the VMWare / Mac platform.

The app uses WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) which renders using Direct X, rather than the usual windows GDI stuff (see here if you want to be bored senseless). Therefore I suspect it's to do with the graphics driver and it's settings, or VMWare not playing nicely with Direct X. 

Having had a trawl around the web, it seems that there are some VMWare Display options, such as turn off "Accellerate 3d graphics"  to take DirectX out of the equation ?

If you've got time, then it would be great if you could do a quick test to see if Mac users at least have something to use in the short term?

Again, thanks for taking the time to put up some feedback.

Sadly, I'm just not attractive enough to own a Mac ;)

@Spin...

I had a C64  too:

10 REM Change screen border to BLACK

20 POKE 53280,0

30 REM Change screen bodu background to BLACK

40 POKE 53281,0

The truly sad thing is, that's from memory!

wasn't dogging your great utility.  just answering spindizzy with possible requirements that might be there.  great work!  

Thanks Dan!

As far as I'm concerned your comments were spot-on, insightful and helpful - hence the name check in my post.

All help, feedback and suggestions and are welcome here!!

@Craig - Unfortunately even though I am years older than I was then...I still giggle when I see "poke" in code...childish...I know.

I'll give it a run Craig. This sexy mf 'er is up to the task, but its the act owning a Mac that makes me attractive.

LOL!

Thanks Brannon, I'll stay tuned....

Does the API have more bells and whistles?  For future--  It would be cool to search for all projects by member 'X' or the latest projects and listen and preview in your app, then be able to "like" all in the same window or something like that.  Then another addition would be to do this task manager thing to organize projects.  That might require some local database or something.

Maybe it would be better to do this as a web based app so the mac or other OS people can use it?  Just suggestions.

Those are good ideas Dan.  I'm trying to nudge Craig to add a download feature to his app.

winxp pro, .net4 just installed, bare OS otherwise.

I likely need to run updated to get up to some level.

Hi Billl

Hmmmm that's unfortunate.....

You generally receive error code 2755 when the Windows Installer is not able to read the source files for installation, or create temporary files it needs to complete the installation.

You could do these checks (sorry if there are any Egg Sucking tutorials here):

• Don't run the install from inside the zip itself - Extract it to a folder and run the setup.exe from there.
• Make sure you have the necessary NTFS permissions on the installer folder - (should be fine though if you extracted it with the same user).
• Make sure you're user is running with enough permissions to install (admin / power user).
• Make sure the Windows folder isn't R/O.
• And everyone's favourite - Make sure you have the latest Urgent Windows updates.

If that doesn't help, then I'll keep digging. But in the meantime:

Is this SP 1/2/3 on XP, and have you run windows update (I know, hideous especially if you're a Mac user).

Also - did you install .Net 4.0 manually, or did the installer do it for you?

Let me know how you get on.

C.

The first bullet: "...Don't run the install from inside the zip itself - Extract it to a folder and run the setup.exe from there..."  I've been guilty of that silly mistake.  

@Bill,

Yeah - I figured you wouldn't have fallen for that one  - Hence the "egg sucking tutorial" reference :)

This error seems to be related to permissions though - so make sure you run with  Administrator access or at least Power User maybe ?

And (one of the top 10 things I never thought I'd say...) maybe Windows Updates are your friend in this case...? There. I said it. Yuk.