n-Track Blog

Yesterday I've merged the 16 bit and 24 bit versions of the program into a single version/registration.
The differentiation does make much less sense now as it did in version 1.x as many consumer soundcards today are 24 bits, while a few years ago the only soundcards that had 24 bits capability were pro or semi-pro models and costed hundreds of dollars. The new price is $64 and is slighly less than the average between the two old prices ($54 and $79), although it is an actual small price increase given that the average of the prices weighted by the ratio of copies of the 16 and 24 bit versions sold was a little below $64. The price increase only marginally offsets the seemingly unstoppable decline in US$ versus the Euro (some 60% since 2000!), which is the currency in which I have to pay my bills. When Italy had its own currency (the 'lira') the fact that the US$ would always be worth more was almost a given, with the Euro that is painfully no longer so.

I've been adding a series of small bug fixes and changes to version 5.1.1, mostly bugs reported or new features suggested by users. It should now be quite a stable version.
Barring some more bug fixes I'll start working on some bigger changes for version 5.2 which will include a new signal path window and probably more flexible signal routing.
Also check out a new cool skin by Ciaran O'Kelly in the skins page

Although it has been with us since Windows 3.0, MME has still its place in the world of audio on Windows. That's what I been thinking today as I found myself adding two small new features to n-Track related to MME audio I/O. MME is certainly not the audio driver format that offers the greatest performance or features, but it is reliable and thanks to the Windows kernel mixer allows seamless and painless coexistance of audio outputs and inputs from and to multiple programs. Of course the kernel mixer is also what makes MME inadequate for low latency operation, so I guess it is ultimately a good thing that we have multiple driver models to choose from.
As with buildings software gains respectability with age... I remember criticizing it years ago for its complexity and lack of performance, but now I think of it as a good old friend, just like when I hear some good old '80s hit song playing on the radio

Maintaining compatibility with old version of Windows is giving me headaches. Build 2287 fixes a crash that happened on Windows 2000 and 98. I also wasn't yet able to find a way to have the n-Track icon have both the new Vista big png-based icons and at the same time appearing correctly on the Start Menu in Windows 98 and 2000. On those OSes the icon currently appears as the Windows default blank icon (but the shortcut does work).

Version 5.0.9, which I'm currently uploading to the server, can import and export multitrack songs as EDL files that are compatible with other multitrack audio programs, including Vegas, Samplitude and Reaper. Actually the program saves in two different EDL formats, one in a format compatible with Vegas (that uses the .txt extension) and one with Samplitude (.edl).
While none of these EDL formats are the ideal format for exchanging songs with other programs, as not all of the information normally stored in n-Track's .sng files can be written to the EDL files (for example effect plugins settings are not included), the song structure (i.e. wave files that made up each track with their exact offsets and lengths) is preserved.
This should be useful for those users that use n-Track along with other programs or that want to collaborate on multitrack recordings with other people using different programs.

Yesterday I've received messages by Ebay and by the company that hosts the ntrack.com server that the server was being used for a phishing scheme involving Ebay.
Apparently some hacker planted a few pages on the web server that with an address like ntrack.com/signin.ebay.com. I assume (I made a backup copy of the pages but I didn't test where they pointed) that as with any phishing scheme the page mocked the login page of Ebay, users landed on the page after clicking on a link in a spammed email message that appeared to come from Ebay and entered their login info enabling the phishers to steal their login and password. The mocked Ebay page was already active on the server, and it looked like they were also preparing a mockup of Paypal... where real money is involved.
These days having a server that sits on the internet is a very scary proposition.
I always wonder when seeing this kind of things why people can't find more productive (not to mention legal) ways to spend their time. At least this time it wasn't as ugly as a day in august 2004 when the server was hacked and the main page (or was it the forum main page?) was replaced by a page that made a myriad of gay-porn popup pages appear.

I'll start this blog thing with an historical issue. The next version of the program will remove an ancient limitation of a maximum of 80 tracks, a limit that was there since version 0.something mainly to save memory as earlier versions of the program allocated data for all supported tracks in advance.

n-Track has evolved from a very simple 1 dialog box program created in 1995 to a relatively complex application and the underlying software architecture and design has had only a few radical changes, but has continuously changed over time. That's one of the most interesting aspects of developing the program, how to change and improve the design while keeping existing functionality and without having to rewrite old code that works. Software development and design often used the construction building metaphor (think of the build term used for identifying incremental software versions), but where the metaphor doesn't apply is what I find unique about software, how you can adapt it and keep old things while changing them. As my personal experience lately shows you really can't do that in building actual buildings, 'refactoring' buildings is often more expensive that tearing them down and rebuilding them. Luckily that doesn't happen with software.