Flash

Remember ToneMatrix – Andre Michelle’s addictive-like-crack Flash audio sequencer?

It’s been added to AudioTool, the browser-based virtual studio:

We have release a small update of the AudioTool and included André’s ToneMatrix. Some features that have been implemented in the last weeks are online as well. Removing an effect for instance will not destroy the cables. The desktop scales now without interrupting the audio output and various other performance tweaks have been made.

Here’s an example of what this glossy bit of Flash yumminess can do:

Kiss an hour of your life goodbye, right about now. Here’s the link.

Here’s a little something via SoundCloud: AudioTool tracks by Joa Ebert.

AudioTool is Flash-based music application that’s like Reason for your Web browser. It turns your Web browser into a virtual music studio.

Are browser-based music tools ready for prime time?

Developer Andre Michelle has announced the first recording made with the HobNox AudioTool, the browser-based virtual studio:

I admit: My session is actually boring. I quickly setup some beats and just one 303 without any effects to test the Streaming and Encoding. Download the OGG-file here. The next update is scheduled for September, 1th. This may shift as we need to wait for FlashPlayer 10. The current version of the AudioTool works with a Java applet to stream the AS3 generated audio to the sound card. We are looking forward to get rid of it.

It’s amazing to see Michelle and others pushing the limits of what can be done with Flash.

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).

Adobe, MAKE SOME NOISE is a campaign, which addresses the lack of dynamic sound manipulation in Flash.

It’s basically a group of Flash audio hackers that are working to get Adobe to make Flash a more powerful platform for audio manipulation:

We think that Flash is and still will be the most popular browser plugin worldwide. Software as we know it today will move bit by bit inside the browser. A lot of companies are currently developing online applications to work with text, images and video. We and a lot of people would also like to provide beautiful online sound and music applications. Thats why we launched this campaign. We want Adobe marketings to be aware of this issue and hopefully decide to add reasonable sound features very soon.

Seems like a worthwhile cause. Most people don’t think of browser-based tools as platforms for creating music, but things like AudioTool are changing that.