Creating and Accessing Encoded, User-facing Containers?
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I want to allow the user to create their own content with a predefined scheme, and then export the collection of it into a single file which can then be easily distributed and another user can simply point to it and load the content.
The content would be a any combination of
- limited amount of audio samples (probably less than 300 in total)
- arbitrary data files that can be read using the filesystem API
- images
Theoretically this is already possible using ZIP, but I'd like the data to stay in one file on the user's computer and allow the user to provide an encryption key to prevent it being unzipped.
This means that HISE would have to access it using a sort of private key, if the file is encoded using a public key.
How would this play with the audio files? If samplemaps cannot exactly be exported, there'd obviously be a metadata file that would help the plugin recreate the sample map upon loading the file itself.
I'm aware that the expansion system might offer these things, but from what I gather, it can only be created from within HISE, not from an exported plugin i.e. using the API. Is this correct?
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@aaronventure you will not be able to stream out of a ZIP file so it has to be decompressed on the user's disk unless you shove the entire content into the users memory.
You can create (even encrypted) expansions on the user machine, that's what I've been doing with PercX for years now, but I forgot how to do it. There's a preprocessor called
HI_ENABLE_EXPANSION_EDITINGthat will include some of the tools required for saving samplemaps in the compiled plugin.Having arbitrary files in there might become a problem though as the expansion system is kind of limited to the specific content types. If it's JSON files or other structured data you can include it in an expansion to store metadata though.
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If I understand you, I may doing this in one of my plugins, though I'm going a bit further than that. Users can create complex instruments, within the compiled plugin, and then distribute a single file—which loads into any instance of the compiled plugin. This includes new sample maps, samples, additive synthesis parameters, impulse responses, HISE tables, MIDI files, and so on.
I'm doing it without expansions—it's just drop and go for the user. I broke it up into multiple files, and put them inside a bundle. I'm not sure what would be the equivalent on windows and GUN/Linux, but I'm guess there's something comparable.
Anyway, you're welcome to my code that (assuming it does) provide the functionality you want. Here's a video showing it in action.
Please note that the encoding DSP—which is doing most of the heavy lifting here—is an offline process. The HISE plugin provides real-time access to the encoding data within traditional DAW host workflow.
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@clevername27 Does it all stay in one file or are you extracting it to a temp folder? How does it work?
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@aaronventure It's a Bundle—a file structure that appears to be a single file (to the user) but is actually a folder. Have you watched the video? It's demonstrated there. The only writing I do is the standard HISE temporary audio and MIDI files when copying them to the host DAW.
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@clevername27 Ah okay. Bundles are not on Windows, to my knowledge. Cool stuff, btw!
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@Christoph-Hart said in Creating and Accessing Encoded, User-facing Containers?:
Having arbitrary files in there might become a problem though as the expansion system is kind of limited to the specific content types.
I think it would just be human-readable text files like JSON to store metadata, yeah.
Thanks for the preproc, I'll look into it. Expansions in general are completely new to me, but luckily we have the expansion emperor on the forum - I'll update this if I get stuck.
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@aaronventure Help me with the ScriptNode, and I'll help you with this? (And thanks.)
