Boots n Cats

Description of Project

Our goal was to recreate a soundbite beats app with selectable buttons, each associated with specific sounds, which then play in succession once you hit a play button. Users have the option of selecting a specific type of beat provided by the program, the number of times it will loop, and the play speed. The purpose of recreating this app was to utilize key COMP110 concepts to create a user-friendly app where people can produce music easily.Our goal was to recreate a soundbite beats app with selectable buttons, each associated with specific sounds, which then play in succession once you hit a play button. Users have the option of selecting a specific type of beat provided by the program, the number of times it will loop, and the play speed. The purpose of recreating this app was to utilize key COMP110 concepts to create a user-friendly app where people can produce music easily.

Team Members

Soham Amin

Aaron Lee

Susan Ngo

COMP 110 Programming Concepts Used

Each class makes use of their respective fields, constructors, and methods (if any), as well as parameters, if needed.
Many of the basic methods are used like the getter, setter, and toString methods.
==, <=, !, etc. are used as boolean statements for our if-thens. The this. is used for calling methods within a class on the same object.
2D-Arrays are used to associate each tile of the grid with a specific mp3 soundbite, so when buttons are toggled the sounds assigned to each tile are played.
If-else statements are used several times in this program. One of the main uses of this concept is to create conditions where the program would recognize if the buttons are toggled or not, and if so it would follow through with the specific code.
A map interface using the HashMap class was used to store the tiles as keys and their corresponding sounds as values.
For-loops are also used multiple times in the program. One of the main uses of this concept is to ask the program to loop through each cell in the 2D array to see which buttons are toggled and then play the respective sounds in order.
Applications were used with the inclusion of boilerplate code, which was found using Google.
StackOverflow was a useful site used to reference classes and methods other people have already created i.e. playing soundbites and putting spaces between beats.
Classes are put in different files, so they could be tested individually in the main method with de-bugging code i.e. System.out.println(“sound 1”).
Files from outside the package were imported by right-clicking unknown objects from StackOverflow that resulted in errors.
SceneBuilder was used to create the application screen. Adding buttons, labels, etc. was done in SceneBuilder than imported to the program.
Basically, none of us had any computer science experience prior to taking COMP110, so almost everything in the program is a concept learned.

Challenges Overcome/ New Concepts Learned

Throughout this project, we ran into a couple of challenges with the audio, mainly because we've never worked with audio before during class. We needed to figure out a code that allowed us to pull the mp3 files from a folder and play it when the button associated with the mp3 is toggled. In addition to this, we learned a lot of concepts for coding in html and css in order to display our project on our GitHub page.

App In Action

Individual Contributions to the Project

Soham Amin

Introduced the idea of creating a soundbite program similar to the Auxy app from the Apple Store. Also coded the majority of the Boots n Cats program including: creating the mp3 files, coding the TileController, TileRunner, BeatKeeper, etc. This enabled the program to set and get specific mp3 files associated with a button as well as allow the program to loop through the beats once the play button was pressed. Originally, the app only had a 3x4 grid, but he got bored during his Econ class and casually quadrupled the size of the grid for fun.

Aaron Lee

Contributed very tiny, tiny amount to coding the Boots n Cats program (for real, Soham did like all the java stuff--he’s crazy smart) and exported the program as a runnable jar file so it can be pushed into GitHub. Helped with the majority of the GitKraken and Atom program to be able to display the project summary on the GitHub page. Edited the project summary after Susan created the rough draft.

Susan Ngo

I'm useless (sorry) Edit: Definitely not useless. Contributed to the idea of the program, troubleshooted html issues during office hours, recorded the video for GitHub, created the layout of the GitHub page (kitty gif and all), and made a rough draft of the project summary.

Goals Achieved

In making this Boots n Cats program, we created a running program where mp3 files are embedded into an 8x6 2D array, able to be prompted into executing a set of methods depending on which buttons are toggled. Additionally, we implemented methods that allow users to specify different beat types, the number of times the program loops, and play speeds before the play button is pressed. Overall, this project challenged us to utilize the recent 2D-Array and Map concept we learned in COMP 110 lectures to recreate this soundbite app.

Goals Outstanding/Future Work

Although we were able to get the program running, there is still a lot of room for improvement including: adding more audio options to the app, synchronizing the beats so the vertical tiles are played all at once, and improving the audio quality when the app is run multiple times. For these improvements we would need some help fine tuning some of the code and researching other methods that could accomplish these changes.