• No objects are created in runtime (memory usage)
• The SampleDataEvent is receiving a static blocksize (steady latency)
• Linear interpolation (sound quality)
• Speed can go down to zero

{source code}

(no preloader - music by basic channel) - Thanks Lee for pointing me!

My favorite session was Keith Peters (Bit-101), presenting fractals and hence philosophical views on the structure we are surrounded. Just great.

Afterwards we went by train to New York Manhattan, Harlem. Well, I have never been to NY, so it blowed my mind. There is maybe no better place to study the goings-on from human-beings in form of architecture, transportation and culture. We also visited the guys from BigSpaceShip, who are lucky having their office very close to the Brooklyn Bridge. After loosing a match in Fussball on their - for us - unorthodox table (three goal keeper in the last row?) and a very close lost of a ping-pong match (Damn it!), we left to the airport for Detroit.

We then had a long travel over the days to Minneapolis. Detroit, Lake Michigan, Chicago. We discovered nice places like Silver Lake, where we found beautiful houses to sell, direct to the lake. Looked like a place to retire, which of course will never happen, right?

Finally we arrived at Flashbelt. Dave Schroeder is a cordial host and we had a great time hanging around with parties, bicycle ride and what not. Especially the last evening is burned in my memory as one of the funniest evenings, I ever had at a conference. The conference itself was the best of Flashbelt, which is very hard to say when thinking of last year.

Pictures taken by Alan Ross: Set 1|2

Ralph Hauwert's session really showed me how personal and technical views can be combined in a single hour. Even I am not into 3D-programming anymore, I loved his mixture of telling his story, why he is into programming while also providing technical insights.

I won't go into details of Hoss session and its never breaking up discussion on blogs and twitter. I just think, this is not a gender issue, more a culture thing. I cannot believe that something like this would have been even noticed in Europe. The only thing, that bothers me, that the discussion may have bad influence on Flashbelt itself. Well, I am pretty sure, that Dave will handle this and I would like to see Hoss invited next year as well!

So what? Flash on the beach is next! Hunt tickets!

To make it clear: I don't love Eclipse. It is still a love-hate relationship and I am often fighting against its philosophy. So far, nothing comparable platform-independent in sight.

MetaLaunch (free)
If your project consists of a bunch of SWCs, you often want to compile them first and your application afterward. Use MetaLaunch to launch several Eclipse launchers from a list.

PBDT - PixelBender Development Tool (free)
Adobe PixelBender Toolkit is not event worth to consider as a code editor, I am afraid. PBDT instead supports semantic highlightning and basic refactoring for your PixelBender shader source code. It even compiles your code in the background. This gives you a very nice workflow in developing shaders.

FDT - Flash Development Tool
Not to forget the sophisticated Actionscript development tool by powerflasher. People often think, you need to be an expert in Actionscript to get benefit from it and still prefer to use the Flash IDE. On the contrary, using FDT helps you learning AS3 with tons of useful features.

We are free for proposals. I am personally more interested in nature than visiting big American cities, but if you live nearby our route and offer food and accommodation we could hang around for some beers and chat.

Joa Ebert developed a very nice Eclipse Plugin for Pixelbender coding, which also compiles Pixelbender code before compiling and launching your SWF. This saves a LOT of time. There is no need to open the Pixel Bender Toolkit at all.

Last thing I am waiting for is a command line compiler from Adobe to allow one and two channel inputs. That would be great for audio processing. I am pretty sure, Joa would implement the compiler in no time.

Some new features besides:

1. Better performance while scaling the desktop
2. Autoconnect (Removing an effect device will connect the source and the target automatically

Alongside we have completely rewritten the audio engine form the scratch, which is not part of the update. This already allows us to add automation and modulation. The audio event system is running with its own garbage collection, pooling all events to reduce glitches from the real garbage collection.
Furthermore there is event postprocessing (Ever heard a super-mario midi file shuffling?). We are working hard to make 1.0 a serious application. I cannot wait to see, what you guys will do with all that new stuff.

Listen to what our team member Alan Ross did with it:

I visited the Frankfurter Musikmesse 2 weeks ago and played with the Yamaha TENORI-ON. I thought, it would be much nicer when the triggered notes would force a wavemap to oscillate. It took me just a few hours to implement. The sound generation is basically a polyphone synthesizer with a simple delay with a variing read-offset to make the tones vibrating in the end. I am already addicted for myself to the cute sequences it always generates.

After uploading it on my laboratory the run began. I am counting more than 250.000 impressions, endless feedback, suggestions and even videos on Youtube. I will definitely put the sequencer in our AudioTool. But don't expect an update before autumn. We are trying to make 1.0 a serious music application with sequencing, automation, modulation, audio-tracks, synthesizers and what not. So there is no time to enhance this little toy. But I have added at least Clipboard support to let you save your pattern to sequence of numbers. Unfortunately the audio output is very glitchy when the context-menu is running.

Audio is the next big thing in Flash.

read more

A simple low-pass filtered feedback in a short delay line with the length of one period of the target frequency and some white noise do the first impression of a plugged string in common. For a guitar you need more tweaking, randomizing parameters and adding the guitar body resonance to get it more realistic. But the basic is done with an algorithm, discovered 1978!
I really like the elegance of the circuit. You basically bring in chaos (white noise contains all frequencies) and the system is going to stable itself and produces a nice waveform, perfectly suggesting a plugged string.

Naturally we are already planning an AudioTool plugin for synthesizing different guitars. But I am worried about the footprint of the algorithm. I stumbled over this comment which pointed out that the Karplus-Strong algorithm is patented. That is tough. At the time being this algorithm was a great accomplishment! But now where even Flash is able to playback code-generated audio data, I would think that someone may stumble over this method even by accident. It is better to commit our lawyer with this issue, but as the comment says, it is a really good example how bad code-patents are.

Listen and picture it for yourself. (Check the CPU!)

The implementation has a static set, but gives you some control on how the guitar is played. Nothing really magic. Definitely it would be a perfect addition to the AudioTool.

Now check out the sources. | And/or check the AudioTool itself.

Anyway I am getting back to work and I am looking forward now to FITC Amsterdam.

Btw: Have you seen this?

Thank you John for your effort in making FOTB everytime a little bit better - which seems hard if attending just the current!

AudioSamples

Flash Logo
Hobnox Logo
My Pixel counterpart

Flickr - Fur Collection

Make sure to watch them in 100%

Read more at Adobe, make some noise.

Here is how we handled sound creation before in the AudioTool
We simply passed 2048 samples (minimum amount) every time the SampleCallbackEvent was fired. The playback was stable - even when scrolling the desktop with a lot of devices. For processes that would block the CPU for some time (e.g. create new plugin instances), we passed 8192 sample (maximum amount) to remain stable playback and execute the processes after. So we dynamically increased the latency once to have more space for heavy computation. Afterward we went back to normal (2048 samples). In fact this worked great!

The Release Player changed all that
With the latest player, every time you increase the number of samples you will increase the overall latency. And there is no way of decreasing it again without stopping the SoundChannel. So now we just pass 3072 samples (~160ms latency) all the time. Meaning that critical processes won't be caught and will cause gaps in playback.

Again we now have 4 times more latency, but playback is overall less stable.

The worst thing is, that nobody told us and I am still not sure, what that is all about. The new sound feature was great and worked great for all release candidates. And all the sudden they changed it - again - without telling anyone. If we had this information before, it would not have been so hard to accept it. And of course we may have found some workarounds.

Read also Joe Berkovitz post | Joa Ebert post | Kai-Philipp Schöllmann post

DAMN!!! The latency is way off with the latest Flash Player 10. I am so disappointed!

Update
Well, this is a weird consequence of Adobe not informing developers when things have changed. I will make a detailed blog post on this next days. In fact, the latency is great somehow okay when you consider the new changes to the Sound API.

Audiotool requires Flash Player 10.

The news have been floating within team Hobnox for some time now and we can finally announce the news about the update of the Audiotool Beta that we're about to roll out in the upcoming days. We're still waiting for Adobe to release the new Flash Player but will share the details with you anyway. Speaking of Adobe, it really looks like the 'Make Some Noise' campaign was successful as you'll read below and that Adobe finally managed to make some noise. Nice. Thanks to everyone who supported the developers.

New Features

• Java applet is removed. Entire signal flow including sound output done in Flash
• Complete refactoring of the CoreAudio programming
• Optimized all plugins DSP code
• Live session recording - Vorbis encoding - Hobnox Library upload
• Plugin Shelf - add/remove plugins at runtime
• New Plugins: Slope, Gate, Phaser, Merger, Splitter
• Short overview of all features on startup

The Future

• Sequencer (Notes, Automation, AudioTracks)
• Remix stuff - Collaboration

We are set
I am quite sure we can launch our update the same day the Flash Player 10 ships.
We are probably the first forcing the user to upgrade to Flash Player 10. But I am also sure nobody will refuse.

Rock'N'Roll

In my understanding an inverted matrix can neutralize an already applied transformation to a Vector3D. So having a Vector3D transformed by a matrix and afterward to the inverted one returns the original Vector coordinates, right?

Check out this simple test.

Can anyone explain this or should I log a bug?

Update: If I use transformVectors instead - the computed values are as expected.