Augmented Notes is Almost Done!

It's been another exciting week for Songs of the Victorians and Augmented Notes, both in terms of publicity and actually development progress.

I had been asked to write a guest post for ProfHacker, the excellent blog portion of The Chronicle of Higher Education that provides "Tips about teaching, technology, and productivity," and my post was published last Tuesday!  I wrote about the launch of Songs of the Victorians and about the difficulty of navigating "Browser hell" (the compatibility issues that result from designing for multiple browsers) and how a tool called BrowserStack can help.  You can view the post here.  I was pleased with the positive feedback I received on twitter, email, and blogs.  I was particularly touched by the incredibly generous comments and praise I received from Professor Bruce Holsinger, a prominent Medievalist at UVa and a member of my dissertation committee:  he wrote a blog post about my ProfHacker article and Songs of the Victorians and its contributions to scholarship.  Thanks, Bruce!!

The other exciting news is that I have built the functionality for Augmented Notes (beta version)!  Now, after users have uploaded their mp3, OGG, MEI, and image files, and have used the "Set Measure Times" selector to record the ending time for each measure (this step controls the measure highlighting), clicking on the "Submit the Times" button will output a .zip file that includes the image files, javascript, css, and html files necessary to have a working archive page.  This archive page is very plain:  it contains only a white background, the score, and the audio file, but it does highlight each measure in time with the music.  

Sample archive page produced by Augmented Notes

I'll spend the next few weeks polishing the system and writing clear instructions for users, and I'll make an official announcement about a launch date soon.  But before I can plan a launch date, I'd like your advice as to what additional features would be useful for Augmented Notes.  

Would you:

1. like user accounts that save your data? This feature would let users access data from an earlier song and add data for a new song that could be grouped with the first song.

2. like a more interesting background for the template archive page?  If so, should it be a different color?  Should it use the background from Augmented Notes (a public domain scan of the manuscript of Franz Schubert's "An Die Musik")?

3. like an instructional video that walks you each step of the system in addition to the directions at the top of every page?

Please leave your feedback in a comment here:  I want Augmented Notes to be as useful as possible, and this is your chance to have your say about the beta version of the tool.

Thanks! I'm looking forward to hearing from you!