I’ve often been missing an easy way to browse through audio sample files. A few composition software have one embeded, but not all. And sometimes I just want to check a sample pack quickly, without opening a big complete DAW application.
As I was looking for an exercise to practice more QML and remembered this, I started writing this little application: Sample Explorer QML
It is a very simple kind a music player, but with interactions designed specially for one precise use case: to browse through a collection of audio sample files.
You may wonder how it is different from a classic music player, but try to open a collection of drum samples (or other very short samples of this kind) in a playlist and see how it’s not convenient for this purpose..
So unlike a regular music player, it doesn’t play all files in the list, only the selected one.
Also it auto-plays when you select a new file.
Now I can easily browse through big sample folders to quickly find what I need.
And as I thought it might be useful for someone else too, I shared it on gitorious:
https://gitorious.org/sampleexplorerqml
I added the QML word in the name as for now it’s a pure QML application, using only core QML types. It was fun to see how far I could go with it, as it already provided all the components I needed for this application.
Maybe later I’ll add some more fancy features by adding some C++ in the mix (like a spectrogram view or other kinds of analyzers..), but for now it already does its main job.
