dev blog (archives)

Introducing.. LoopDropZ

A couple of years back, the office downstairs got some new fire doors installed. These doors close themselves, loudly. Did I say loudly? I meant, INSANE RACKET! They go BANG! BANG! BANG! All day, every day. That day, my quality of my life suffered a serious blow.

Faced with the prospect of having to get a local authority office to actually "Do Something", I realized that I would, in the inevitably enormous interim, need to come up with some kind of solution, myself.

Armed with a fair experience of audio engineering and acoustic principles, I set about creating a set of "Noise Barriers", basically a mix of brown, pink and white noise, tuned to frequencies designed to mask the continual thumping of the doors. These work superbly. All you need to do is get them to play in a seamless loop.

After much searching and downloading and testing, I discovering that this seemingly simple task is almost impossible to achieve in an unobtrusive, background, resource-friendly way, and got out the coding spanner.. LoopDropZ was born.



LoopDropZ does one thing, it plays audio files in a loop, seamlessly, with no gaps, pops, or clicks. You drag wav files in, and they loop. Simple.

Of course being one of my apps, it's got of other useful functionality and ergonomic goodies, and remembers stuff, and so on, but basically, that's it; audio in a loop, and it looks like this..



Or maybe like this..



Except on your desktop there will probably be fancy windows with big round corners and stuff. Each to their own!

LoopDropZ can also double-up as your system's default wav preview application, again, performing its duties unobstrusively; this time posting no more than a tray icon. And yes, it can do both at once, even a hundred at once. And, erm, more.

Full details, downloads, comments and such on the LoopDropZ page.

for now..

;o) Cor