Art Gillespie » musicnerd

Flash 10 ‘Astro’ and Audio Programming

agillesp — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:33:42 +0000

If you thought there were a lot of music RIAs (RIMAs?) coming out now, just wait until Flash 10 hits the streets later this year. From Tinic Uro, the guy responsible for audio in Flash at Adobe:

Flash Player 10 code named Astro supports a new event on the Sound object: “samplesCallback”. It will be dispatched on regular interval requesting more audio data. In the event callback function you will have to fill a given ByteArray (Sound.samplesCallbackData) with a certain amount of sound data. The amount is variable, from 512 samples to 8192 samples per event. That is something you decide on and is a balance between performance and latency in your application. The less data you provide per event the more overhead is spent in the Flash Player. The more data you provide the longer the latency for your application will be. If you just play continious audio we suggest to use the maximum amount of data per event as the difference in overall performance can be quite large.

So, Flash finally has an audio callback mechanism like CoreAudio or ASIO. It’s not very low latency–the lower bound of 512 samples at 44,100 kHz gives you about 12ms flash to bang–but it’s much, much, much better than what developers have had to work around so far.

I’d say you can look for a whole wave of Audiotool type music suites in the next couple of years, giving traditional entry-level apps like Garageband and Fruityloops a run for their newbie users.

DreamOn Pro

agillesp — Tue, 13 May 2008 18:29:50 +0000

This software looks HOT

DreamOn Pro

ReBirth, 2008 Edition

agillesp — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:16:26 +0000

I will never, ever forget downloading and running the demo of ReBirth sometime in 1997. These incredible sounds were coming out of my computer, and the future seemed amazing and limitless. Interesting career note, I remember thinking I MUST LEARN HOW TO WRITE THIS KIND OF SOFTWARE. Heh.

I probably will forget the first time I saw Hobnox (today), not because it’s any less awesome than ReBirth was in 97, but because we’re so spoiled with virtual instruments coming out our ears (and phones).

As a developer, I’m stoked that they can do this much in Flash in realtime. As a user, I’m frustrated that I don’t seem to be able to save my creations or bounce them out to aif or mp3, but I’m sure all that’s coming.

What do you guys think? Will we be making music in our browsers any time soon?