Tag Archive for 'audiotool'

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Audiotool wins at FlashForward

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.

Rasselbock Recordings

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.

ActionScript 3 Vorbis Encoder

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.

Flashforward Festival Finalist!

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.

Grimme Online Award 2008 – Hobnox wins!

Grimme Online Award 2008I 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.

Experimenting with Midi

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.

Audiotool Liveact

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.

Confusion (AS3 Remix)

This movie requires Flash Player 9

This little remix has been created using the Hobnox AudioTool. For the recording I used Audacity which is the reason why it does not sound very saturated — there is something wrong with my settings.

The mix itself is quiet simple but the 303 pattern is not 100% accurate I think. Anyways I love that sound. Remember the whole audio data is calculated realtime in AS3 (44.1khz, 16bit, stereo) …and I had to use my crappy laptop touch-pad while performing ;-)

The original song is “New Order – Confusion (Rave Mix)” which is also part of the soundtrack from the first Blade movie.