Tag: audio

New year, new look, new content

Now that 2006 is well underway I thought it was time for a new look to the ole blog and some new content. The theme is based on ‘Gentle Calm’ by Phu Ly, but I modified it a bit to give more space for the content and other little bits and pieces. Hopefully it will make things easier to read.

Also there is now the first of my tutorials on using Plogue Bidule. Its a beginners guide to using [tag]Bidule[/tag] and takes you through the process of creating a complete polyphonic synthesizer using the vast array of modules they provide. You can read it here.

If you have been interested in [tag]modular audio[/tag] software before but either never got around to trying it or just felt daunted by the whole experience then hopefully this should gently ease you in to the wonders of creating your own instruments and sound mangling tools. At the moment you can try bidule for free, or buy it for a cheap price before the full release hits the virtual shelves (and its cheap at only 70 dollars). So there has never been a better time to get started.

Any comments or ideas for this tutorial and future tutorials are warmly welcomed.

All flash and no bang

Flash 8 is announced, everyone is getting very excited about the new toys and tricks that are available, but, again it seems as though we are all deaf. (NOTE : I am writing this before i know for sure *exactly* what is in the new player, but from reading this it certainly looks like its all visual stuff)

Ok, so there are now 32 channels of sound in the new player (well, thats what it says here and there is a demo) BUT, oh, thats 32 mono channels, so 16 stereo channels.

Well, thats an improvement, but what can i do with those channels? anything new? theres all these fandangled bitmap filters and effects, why not the same for audio? Why do i have to be stuck with using mp3’s if i want some nice sound.
I want ogg’s and i want to access the sound buffer.
It doesnt even have to be real time, just let me write some numbers into an array, say here little sound object, eat this and loop it please. If i can update it at least some of the time, that would be cool, maybe play it back at different speeds. Im not asking for time stretching or anything.
Even some pre-defined filters would go a long way, just yer standard low pass / band pass / high pass would be great.

Oh well, maybe next time. At least i can do some motion detection with the camera and pass some data from that off via OSC (using flosc) to something nice, like plogue bidule