Adobe has responded to calls from developers for better sound generation capabilities in Flash, and is introducing new features in Flash Player 10 that should lead to more sophisticated Flash based sound tools:

Dynamic Sound Generation — Dynamic sound generation extends the Sound class to play back dynamically created audio content through the use of an event listener on the Sound object.

This will support dynamic audio streaming. Details are available at Tinic Uro’s blog:

In Flash Player 10, code named Astro, the Sound object will have one more method which is designed to work together with the “samplesCallback” event handler. It will extract raw sound data from an existing sound asset.

That means any mp3 file you have in the library or load externally can be accessed and processed.

With what we provide in Flash Player 10, we hope that we are addressing the most pressing needs of what you want to do with sound. It will likely be just a matter of time until we’ll see high level frameworks done by the community on the magnitude of something like Papervision3D. The next couple of years should be very interesting indeed when it comes to sound on the web.

What’s missing? Unfortunately some features did not make it into Flash Player 10: Extracting audio data from a microphone and extracting audio from a NetStream object. We are aware that both features are highly desirable, but for various reasons it was not possible to make this happen in this release.

This is good news for developers and good news for musicians. I’m already impressed by what is possible with Flash (see AudioTool).