#pc-version

How do I tell the DJ what to play?

I came up with two ways which I think you'll like. As seen in this video, TellDJ sits in the corner. You can left, or right, click on this icon and there will be an option saying "Hold and Speak". You click and hold this button and request the song. Simple :)

The alternate way is via a key combination (of your choice, of course). The default is CTRL + Shift + T and you can simply hold this combination and speak. The advantage of this is that you don't need to lift your hand up to the mouse, whilst you're typing. Also if, for whatever reason, the system tray isn't visible (maybe you're in a fullscreen app), you can use the key combination to request the song. Not bad, eh? :)

Do I need an expensive microphone?

My aim with TellDJ for the PC was to make it free and accessible to as many people as possible. Therefore, pretty much any microphone is supported. If Windows recognises your microphone, then it should work. Of course, I can't test every microphone, but I've successfully tested four different types of microphones - cheap dedicated, webcam, wireless headset and Kinect. All worked. But, as is my philosophy, I want to give you even more control and I don't want you to have to adjust to TellDJ - it should be the other way round. 

Let's say your microphone is quite old and isn't very sensitive or it sits right next to your speaker. You have music blaring out your speaker and when you try and request a new song, the microphone can't hear your voice well enough because its being drowned out by the music coming out the speaker. TellDJ lets you set a 'mute on listen' option which will mute your PC whilst you're requesting a song so that your microphone has a chance to hear your voice. No more worrying about the position of your microphone :D

What you will need, however, is Windows 7 (Vista is untested at the moment, so I'll get back to you on that one) and Zune.

How hard is it to update TellDJ to my update Zune collection?

Zune doesn't have an API which makes it difficult for me, as a developer, to interact with it. However, after some knuckling down and hard work, I've made updating your collection a breeze. There are two options. 

Lets say you've added new songs to your Zune collection and you want TellDJ to be able to launch those songs as well. You simply click on the TellDJ icon in the corner and tell it to update the library. Any custom pronunciations you've created in the Voice Recognition Lab remain unaffected.

The alternative is a complete reset. This will do the same as the above, but will remove all custom pronunciations.

Voice Recognition Lab

The VRL remains as you've seen it already, but there are a couple minor changes. Firstly, playback controls have been removed because they felt like more effort than simply interacting with the media player directly with the mouse (or using a multimedia keyboard). The voice aspect is great, but there's a time and place for it and I felt that using it for playback just didn't feel right and felt like it was more effort than just controlling playback manually. Maybe you disagree, in which case, let me know. 

I have also added a 'Settings' tab where you can set the options (default player, key combination to activate TellDJ etc..)

What's left to do?

This project is quite complex and there are quite a few tricky aspects. This means that bug hunting is annoyingly tedious but I need to test all sorts of scenarios. What's mainly left now, besides a few more tests, is deployment. Basically, as is my way, things aren't as straightforward as creating a normal setup file. For the sake of future plans, deployment is slightly trickier than the usual process. This is new to me so I need to read up on that and figure out what the best plan is. 

Feedback

As I said earlier, I'm releasing a free PC version as a thank you. I don't want to make feedback mandatory which is why I'm making the download public and without (m)any strings (usual disclaimers will apply - use at own risk, no warranty etc..). However, if you do download TellDJ Rehearsal (which is the name for just the beta version) when it's released, it would be really appreciated if you report any bugs you encounter with as many details as possible (such as "I was playing [insert favourite game here] and I couldn't request a song when I held down CTRL + SHIFT + T, but it worked with CTRL + T"). Or thereabouts.

Anywho, I think that covers pretty much what I want to share for the time being. If no major development issues crop up, hopefully you'll be using TellDJ Rehearsal by the end of the week :)