Actionscript3, Flash, Java, C#, C++, Algorithms & Imageprocessing
I just put up a site with all the AudioTool recordings that I think are quite interesting. It is way easier to share them like that instead of posting about every single track.
I will also put some more sets and other tracks there if I find the time. The site will update randomly.
Here are the slides from my Flash On The Beach 2008 session “AudioTool’s Private Parts”. 2mb without a prelaoder. You will need Flash Player 10 to pass through to version detection or you can save the SWF directly to disk and watch it with Flash Player 9.
Last night I spent about 9 hours writing a build script for the AudioTool allowing us to compile each plugin into its own SWF container. I think it is the first time a Flash project is taking more than 5 minutes for me to compile completly.
I figured out that it is definitly not easy to handle the mxmlc or compc in a way we needed it to be. The point is that we have for each plugin three modules A, B, C and a library D. A depends on D. B depends on A and D. C depends on A, B and D. Now to make it even more complex we have A, B, C and D in one project so that developing in this environment stays still simple. The solution to compile all modules in a way we need them to be was first generating unique entry points for the SWF files because we do not want to work with SWC libraries (or the SWF inside the SWC package). After having the unique entry points we compile D (and its dependencies as well) without including the source of A, B or C. Afterwards we can compile A. But B is dependent on A so we have to compile a SWF for A and then a SWC for A so B can link to A as an external library. C is also analog to this but needs B as a library as well. In the end it was 5am and I was happy to have the complete build working which generates a lot of SWF files and SWC libraries.
Since it is very hard to configure Ant for this (I was using XSL in the beginning for automated code generation) I started developing my own Ant tasks. I have to say that it is really simple and saved us hours of work. We have now one single XML file containing the dependencies and the Ant task will do the rest (code generation, compile tasks, etc.).
Last friday was an awesome day. It was my birthday, Microsoft released Photosynth which is a product I have been watching since two years and we won the FlashForward Award in the category Sound with our Audiotool.
The Audiotool development became a very interesting topic. We implemented so many things to keep stuff optimized not only on the code layer but also on the algorithm layer. I am really looking forward to talk about some techniques in my session “Audiotool’s Private Parts” at Flash on the beach and Flash on tap.
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.
As 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.
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.
I am more than proud to announce that we won the Grimme Online Award in the category “Special”. It is the most prestigious award in Germany releated to new media. Hobnox has been picked out of 1900 nominees and we made it.
The category “Special” has been introduced to cover high quality and highly innovative projects which do not fit into any other category like “Information”, “Education” or “Entertainment”. Regarding to the press statement Hobnox has been picked not only because of its high quality content and design but also because of the Noxtools — and this makes me especially happy.
This evening Kai-Philipp and me were playing around with the Hobnox Audiotool to test some of the upcomming Midi features.
In the middle of the performance we lost the connection to the little cubes and had to restart the Midi bridge between Flash and the devices. It is still in an early stage but a whole load of fun.
The little cubes were provided by our colleague Oliver who is currently reviewing them. They are comming from percussa.com and are able to send CC values based on their orientation.
This year Hobnox is sponsoring the party at the Flashforum conference (FFK08). This means you will be able to listen to some electronic music synthesized with AS3. I do not know if that is completly geeky or absolutely cool — probably both.
André, Kai-Philipp and me will do a performance with the audio tool. I think I should add rough MIDI support pretty quickly. André will also spin the turntables so prepare for some techno and house music.
By the way the Audiotool has opened its doors. You can try it out without even having an invite now. And besides that we added a bunch of Facebook applications to sex-up your profile.
