"It's difficult, but solvable with one or two decent developers/project managers in a few months. I know as I've seen it done twice now."
It was actually my first task that I ever did "for real", though we did only the raw recording; the processing was done by older code that had all the quirks built in. It was a success, too. The problem itself is easy, but it's definitely in the class of things that can be made arbitrarily hard by added requirements with no thought given to costs/benefits. Fortunately on my project, the devs and the management were on good terms, so much thought was given to cost/benefit tradeoffs, but I can easily see cascading failure in a different environment. Even the easiest software projects can and are sunk by that.
It was actually my first task that I ever did "for real", though we did only the raw recording; the processing was done by older code that had all the quirks built in. It was a success, too. The problem itself is easy, but it's definitely in the class of things that can be made arbitrarily hard by added requirements with no thought given to costs/benefits. Fortunately on my project, the devs and the management were on good terms, so much thought was given to cost/benefit tradeoffs, but I can easily see cascading failure in a different environment. Even the easiest software projects can and are sunk by that.