I can now let folks begin banging on the next release of FuzzMeasure.

I haven’t reached 100% completion yet, but I feel that FuzzMeasure will not need much more major work before I release it. There are a few less-often-used-but-still-important features still pending, but I’d like to get the feedback loop started as early as I can. That way, I will get a better idea of where I need to concentrate my efforts before launching.

One catch: You must have access to a recent build of Leopard. Please contact me via email (chris@supermegaultragroovy.com) and I’ll give you further information about downloading the beta.

You know, I’ve been meaning to make some measurements of iPods with FuzzMeasure, and post them to this site. However, all my free time has to go straight into building FuzzMeasure, that I rarely get a chance to actually use it.

Well, one of my long-time (and very knowledgeable) customers, Marc Heijligers, has done what I’ve wanted to do for years now. Also, he’s done a great job of it and used many of FuzzMeasure 2.0’s new features in the process (step responses, minimum phase, etc).

Read Marc’s analysis to see how the latest generation iPod has decreased in audio quality. I’m curious how it compares to the ‘high-end’ iPod Touch and iPhone devices.

I get really caught up in adding new features that make up a new release of FuzzMeasure. What begins as an innocent idea from some of my trusted friends can quickly turn into features that absolutely must make the next release. One thing leads to another, and it’s been well over a year since your last major release.

Of course, part of the delay can be attributed to the very different life I live since Andrew was born. (By the way, he turned one yesterday, and I can’t imagine not having him around.) It’s hard to balance working on FuzzMeasure with playing with your son in your spare time, but such is the life of an entrepreneur.

That said, I think I’m doing very well. I will probably slip a little on the date I have set in my mind for my next release, but I will try my best to meet it. I want to try my hardest to get all the features that users have asked me for over the past year, and a few more that they didn’t even know they needed.

Anyway, I have a lot of work to do, and not much time left to blog!

Saw this quote pop up on a forum the other day. Thought I’d share…

[FuzzMeasure is] the easiest to use “mobile” setup I’ve been able to put together. Praxis is more powerful, but is more like flying an Airbus 320, where [FuzzMeasure] is like an agile acrobatic plane with just a VFR instrument set. —Jon Marsh

I should post these quotes more often.

I was planning to hold off on releasing the DRC output PlugIn until FuzzMeasure 2.1, but some slight modifications to the source and some housekeeping allowed me to get the release out sooner for 2.0 users. I know some folks were looking for a way to easily get FuzzMeasure to output impulses they could use with their BruteFIR and Squeezebox setups (see here for more details on how to set this up), and this should help make that whole process go much more smoothly.

I have released this PlugIn via Google’s Project Hosting. You can reach the smug project page at http://code.google.com/p/smug/. You’ll also notice that the DRC PlugIn is released with full source under the MIT license, so you can basically do what you want with it. If you’re not looking to touch the code, though, you’ll find binary packages for both drc and DRCPlugIn that should be totally ready to go on your machine.

FuzzMeasure 2.0 shipped with a very powerful PlugIn interface, but I didn’t work hard enough to document it or make it reusable. Part of the reason was that I wasn’t sure what types of PlugIns people actually needed. I could have easily shipped a PlugIn that allowed you to attenuate (i.e. lower the level of) your measurements, but that’d be useless. Finally, the Digital Room Correction PlugIn gave me an opportunity to put a very useful example out there for folks to build on.

Keep your eye out for more updates in the form of PlugIn examples in the near future. By writing the PlugIns in Python (with the help of PyObjC), they’re very easy to churn out, and the code is nice and compact.