Sequence Expert
I built a full-stack tool that lets teams hear audio sequences instantly.
In screenless play, audio is the interface. Every sequence in Kibeam Learning's interactive books, from a character's greeting to background music, is defined in XML files that reference audio assets.
To verify what a sequence would actually sound like, the team had to cross-reference the script, XML files, and filesystem. It was a frustratingly manual process, bouncing team members between five different applications.
~5 min per sequence
Having performed comedy for over a decade, I knew that a 300ms pause can make or break a punchline. Writing for PBS taught me that kids need a moment of silence after new vocabulary to process it. The existing workflow made it painful to iterate on those micro-decisions because every timing tweak required a full rebuild.
Process friction meant:
- QA had to wait for hardware builds to verify simple audio updates
- Producers couldn't audition existing audio when planning retrofits
- Technical Designers couldn't validate script edits without building to device
The Solution
One click to play.
No tracing. No DAW. No hardware builds.
I built Sequence Expert, a full-stack local application that parses our XML structure and plays back the audio as it would sound on the device. Select a sequence, hit play, and hear it immediately.
UNDER THE HOOD
How It Works
The problem was fragmentation. Sequence logic references lived in one file. Audio references in another. Asset mappings in a third. The tool needed to unify them automatically.
Sequence Expert
The browser never sees the fragmentation—just a unified timeline.
The tool works in three phases: parse the sequence structure to get the skeleton, resolve abstract IDs against the asset manifest to find filenames, and hydrate each node with a playable file path.
async loadMediaAndWaits(sequenceId) { // 1. Get sequence structure (just IDs, no files yet) const sequence = this.sequences.find( (s) => s.id === sequenceId ); // 2. Get the asset dictionary (ID → filename mapping) const assets = await this.loadAssetManifest( sequence.basePath ); // 3. Hydrate: cross-reference to build playable paths sequence.children.forEach((node) => { if (node.type === "media") { const assetId = node.getAttribute("assetId"); const file = assets.find( (a) => a.id === assetId )?.file; node.fullPath = `${sequence.assetPath}/${file}`; } }); }
Code sample is representative; proprietary details have been generalized.
The backend is a Python/Flask server that performs real-time audio transcoding—converting hardware-native formats to browser-playable audio on the fly. A teammate built the initial transcoding logic. I extended it with cross-platform deployment—automatic DNS configuration for Windows, Mac, and Linux—so anyone on the team could run the server locally without manual network setup.
Impact
"Choksi identified a pain point and built a tool that let us listen to files on our workstation, rather than downloading test builds to the device—a process that could take five minutes per build."Madeline Mechem
Software Developer, Kibeam
Reflections
In stand-up comedy, you polish jokes every night. Nothing's locked in stone. That's what creative teams need: fast iteration, tight feedback loops, the ability to hear changes before committing to them. That's what I built Sequence Expert to enable.