Overview
The orDrumbox project aims to create a software drum machine with additional song composition functions. These functions include the ability to create and modify multiple instrument tracks to create new songs and an automatic fill engine to add various patterns to the songs. For this test, I have downloaded the setup-ordrumbox-0.9.06-win32.exe installer and the source files from the project's sourceforge.net page.
For more information, please see the project's home website.
Prime Directive #1
The first prime directive is if the system accomplishes a useful task. orDrumbox appears to accomplish its task rather effectively with an easy-to-use interface that allows users to choose song templates and edit them using the various buttons and clicking on the step sequencer. It also allows the user to play these songs, but the sound quality seems to be lacking as I heard a lot of static. While the poor sound quality detracts from the user's experience, it is good enough to give the user a clear picture as to how the song sounds. All in all, orDrumbox succeeds in fulfilling its task as a drum machine and a song composition tool.
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| The orDrumbox user interface with a pre-made song loaded. |
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| A modified version of the pre-made template with extra cymbal hits and a new cowbell track. The changes are in red. |
Prime Directive #2
The second prime directive concerns the ease of the software's installation by an external user. orDrumbox was extremely easy to install thanks to the setup executable provided which makes it so that all the user needs to do is have Java 1.6 installed and follow the installer. The installer can even create a shortcut on your desktop for the user! I did have some problems getting the program to launch from the shortcut, but I believe this was due to the way that my system is set up and I could easily launch it from the command line using the java -jar command or executing the Launcher script in the installation directory. As a result, orDrumbox easily passes the second directive.
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| The orDrumbox installer makes installation extremely simple for anyone who has installed a Windows program before. |
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| Finished with the installation. The installer even includes installation progress bars like most other Windows installers! |
Prime Directive #3
The third and final directive is fulfilled if it is easy for an external developer to understand and modify/enhance the system. Unfortunately, this is where orDrumbox falls short. The package of source files fails to include any developer level documentation for external developers which is definitely not desirable. In addition, the source code itself suffers from a lack of commenting as seen below. However, some of the function and variable names make their purposes rather self explanatory which might make understanding the source code a little bit easier.
public Element toXml(Document xmldoc) {
Element scaleElement = xmldoc.createElement("scale");
scaleElement.setAttribute("display_name", getDisplayName());
scaleElement.setAttribute("freq", getFreq() + " ");
scaleElement.setAttribute("rand", getRand() + " ");
scaleElement.setAttribute("order", getOrder() + " ");
scaleElement.setAttribute("lgr_segment", getLgrSegment() + " ");
for (int iNumScalenote = 0; iNumScalenote < scaleNotes.size(); iNumScalenote++) {
Scalenote scalenote = (Scalenote) scaleNotes.get(iNumScalenote);
scaleElement.appendChild(scalenote.toXml(xmldoc));
}
return scaleElement;
}By looking at the source code, the problems with trying to work on this system becomes apparent. For example, an external developer would probably guess that the function above is used to export a scale element to a XML file based on its name, but the lack of any commenting makes it difficult to know for certain without going through each line of the function. Consequently, orDrumbox fails the third directive as there is no documentation and very little commenting which forces any external developers to look at every line of code to understand what the program is actually doing.
Conclusion
Overall, the orDrumbox appears to successfully fulfill two of the three prime directive of open source software. Not only does it accomplish the tasks that it intended to, but it is also extremely easy to install on a Windows system. On the other hand, the lack of documentation and commenting would make external development of this system rather difficult and time consuming as the only way to understand the program is to go over every single line of code. Therefore, the orDrumbox system successfully complies with the first two prime directives, but fails to meet the third prime directive of open source software.
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