SoundSoftware Code Site

Projects in this site are now taggable. This means you can add any number of tags to your project -- short pieces of text which represent some quality of the project that it might have in common with others.

A tag can be any text you like, but they're most useful if you choose tags that are already being used for the same thing by other projects (where possible).

To add tags, go to the Settings page for your projects -- you can find the tags list near the bottom of the information tab in the settings.

Here are some examples of the kinds of things you might like to tag. All the tags here are linked to the projects using those tags already on this site:

• the sort of thing it is (library, plugin, paper)

• the general area of research the project is in (feature extraction, sonification, beat track, mir)

• the stage of completeness of the work (experimental, alpha, beta, stable)

• the licence you are publishing it under (gpl, bsd, creative commons)

• the language it's written in (c++, java, python)

• whether it's intended for a specific operating system (osx, windows, android)

• any other interesting details of what it does or what sort of data or standards it works with (chroma, rdf, vst, spectral, vamp, qt, midi)

This will help others find your work and put it in context. You can now search by tag or text on the project list page, so this should become very useful over time.

One of today's crop of new features:

The repository page for a project, which shows you the current state and history for the source code of that project (like this for example) now includes a link to download the revision you are currently looking at, directly, as a zip file.

This is a quick way to get a snapshot of the source code from a repository -- unlike a full clone of the repository, you don't need to use a Mercurial tool to do this and you only get the version you asked for, not the whole history.

(Of course if you plan on doing any development work on the code, you'll still want to start by cloning the repository rather than just downloading a snapshot!)

An exciting new feature that has appeared this week is the ability to list paper publications in your project's front page. (See the MATCH project for an example.) This simple feature gives your readers the ability to associate your published work directly with any code used to generate results for it.

To enable this for your project, go to Settings -> Modules tab on your project's home page, select Bibliography, and hit Save. Then just go to your project's home page and click "Add publication to this project".

We are still testing and refining this feature, so expect some more tweaks and new details during the coming weeks. In the mean time, we'd appreciate your feedback.

With this morning's update, each project page now has a Members entry in the navigation bar (next to the project's Overview link).

The Members link shows the list of project members, of course, but it is also where you should go to add or remove any members for projects you manage. The Members tab formerly found in the project settings page has been removed.

This update also brings the site up to the latest stable Redmine release, and fixes a number of other issues.

We've just launched an extension to our existing project documentation feature, to add support for MATLAB documentation.

Our what feature?

The documentation feature allows you to document your source code inline, and to have the documentation automatically extracted and shown on this site.

To date we have had support for Javadoc (for Java code, naturally) and Doxygen (an inline documentation format used most often in C++). Both of these involve writing documentation for each class or method in your Java or C++, in the form of a specially formatted comment above the class or method declaration.

What's new is that we've just added support for MATLAB as well. By convention, MATLAB is often documented using an extended comment at the top of each source file prior to the code itself. Our extractor will now pull out such comments and make them available in your project pages through a "Code docs" link on the project navigation bar. You don't have to do anything to switch this on: it just happens.

See our Help page for more information, including how to switch this off if you don't want it!

We've just added a feature that may be useful for projects that have a lot of information they want to include in their overview page.

Your project description can already include wiki formatting – headings, italics, even images. But it's not easy to manage a complex description in the project settings, and if you have a lot to say, the project overview page can end up being quite hard to read.

So we've added the ability to replace the normal layout of information boxes on the project's front page with a single wiki page that you can edit as you see fit. If you feel that extended introductory information is more useful to your readers than the automated updates you get in the normal overview page, you might like to try this. You can see an example at the SMALLbox project.

To enable it, go to your project's Settings and enable "Use your own Welcome page" under the Welcome page tab. There's a link there that you can use to create and edit your new page.

(Note that you must have the Wiki module enabled for this feature to be available. You can find that under Modules in your project's settings.)

The code.soundsoftware.ac.uk site has a new feature – the ability to use the project repository to track an existing external repository, maintaining a read-only copy of it automatically which users of this site can browse and check out.

We've had quite a bit of interest in using this site to list and index projects that are relevant to audio and music researchers and that are already publicly hosted on other code sites (Google Code, SourceForge, Github etc). In response, we've introduced this new feature to make such a listing more useful. With it, you can set up a project here for your code and then link the repository to your existing external repository, so users here can browse your changes while making it quite clear that the primary location for the project is at your existing hosting service. An example of a project using this facility is AIM-C.

To set this up, go to your project settings and follow the instructions found under the Repository tab.