Archive for July, 2008

Rasselbock Recordings

Published
by
joa
on Jul 30, 2008
in Flash, as3, personal and projects
. 1 Comment

Besides implementing OggVorbis I was working on an effect for a while. It is called the Rasselbock and will probably not make it into the next launch but since I love the device so much I have some top-secret recordings of what that little guy can do.

It is basically an IDM/glitch-type effect unit with a lot of cool features. It supports sequenced effects like gate, stutter, etc. and keeps them synchronized to the beat. A killer feature is that it includes also a sequenced mixing unit. This sounds maybe a little bit bizzare but once you can play with it you will probably love it.

All of these songs were made in about 5 minutes and are very cheap. Anyways it is a lot of fun to take any sort of instrument (like a metronome) and route it through the Rasselbock.

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ActionScript 3 Vorbis Encoder

Published
by
joa
on Jul 24, 2008
in Flash, as3, experiments and news
. 11 Comments

Vorbis Encoding TimesAs André already mentioned we have finally got an Ogg Vorbis Encoder in ActionScript 3. André wrote a lot about the benefits already.

Now what I really like about the encoder is the way we could minimize the encoding time by ~50%! I know two implementations of Ogg Vorbnis. One is written in C and another one in Java. What we did first was just getting it to work and it looked pretty much like the C/Java version. Then we started optimizing the code by comparing the encoding results always to reference files. I am quiet happy because on my machine we reduced the encoding time from 32sec to 16.5sec with simple optimizations and tricks.

Where to go from here? Of course we think the best we can do is to open-source the encoder. But there are a couple of other things in my mind. I started modifing Tamarin and added two functions to the Math class. Those convert a Number to its binary IEEE32 single-precision representation and vice versa. With those two functions we could get huge speed improvements for performance hungry tasks like this one. I hope Adobe will not forget about this as well — there seems to be general problem currently trying to support the simple Flash user on the one hand and the “Flash explorer” on the other hand.

I know you may ask what this feature could be good for, but doing floating point math using bitwise operations is a killer when it comes to performance. We are currently not allowed to do this and there is no reason for that.

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Flashforward Festival Finalist!

Published
by
joa
on Jul 23, 2008
in Flash and news
. 0 Comments

Hooray! We are a finalist at the Flashforward Festival in the category “Sound”. Please vote for the AudioTool in the People’s Choice section as well.

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