XYplorer Beta Club
Example: Had some audio I needed to convert from 5.1 to stereo today with a transcode using ffmpeg. Some would write a Bash script, or perhaps even just use a good(?!) old batch file if in Windows. For me, it's far easier to use XY as the heart of everything I do file related on a computer up to the point it gets passed to another program. Now, there's a new little utility script under "The Button" -> "Music Utilities" -> that converts 5.1 audio to 2 channel .flac or .wav that sounds just right and doesn't drop the ".1" channel out of the mix, and it's just waiting, out of the way, for a couple of mouse clicks. The XY part took no time at all (quotes and I have made our peace at last). It's easier than doing a remix in Audition (or whatever). The ffmpeg part - no post about it ever seems perfect, and the documentation is lacking, but it could do what I wanted it to do, and finally did. Now I've got a script that I don't ever have to think about again - and not a bad template for any other multi-channel surround sound down-mixes I may ever need to do in a hurry in the future.
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I started serious programming using Paradox for DOS of all things. A good scripting language built around a decent interactive shell (for the time). I debugged it under OS/2
(because it had better interrupts than Windows at the time to run multiple instances for lock checking, etc., from my workstation). And yes, I got it working under a Novel network successfully! (Doesn't seem like much of a big deal, but I had fun.) Here, we've got a fantastic shell with a matched scripting language. It's comfortable for me, and it's a paradigm that I like - a shell that can get pretty much anything you really need done interactively, on top of a scripting language that works with it perfectly. I am grateful that Don didn't choose to use an existing general-purpose scripting language (or *gasp* just have macros). His purpose-built scripting language is more elegant because it exactly suits its purpose, and imho it's easier, even if you have prior skills (of whatever sort), because it's so closely tied to the UI. That it's PHP-like was a good choice as it's very straightforward.
Plus, my wife likes it - and her computer scares her a little. But not from within XY - it reminds her a little of Solid Explorer for Android, only it's full of new wonderfulness. She loves the mouse down previews, for example, and got used to the interface extremely quickly. I gave it to her as a present (I was a little worried), but she loves it.
Thank you, Don. Some days, if I get stressed, and it's hard to start work, I'll relax and work on a script to get warmed up. Beats the heck out of any other computer game I know.
