audio – Parerga und Paralipomena http://www.michelepasin.org/blog At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded - Wittgenstein Sun, 19 Jun 2011 20:23:52 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2.11 13825966 Enabling web-audio in Chrome http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2011/06/19/enabling-web-audio-in-chrome/ Sun, 19 Jun 2011 20:23:52 +0000 http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/?p=1028 I haven’t realized that Chrome has a whole bunch of invisible experimental settings that you can turn on just by going to “about:flags“.

 

Chrome about:flags options view

 

Some of them will open up the musical capabilities of html5, which are pretty cool. Example, once you switch on the ‘web-audio‘ setting on Chrome, if you use a suitable musical musical library you could play a note just by issuing these javascript commands:


var n = Note.fromLatin('A4'); 

var freq = n.frequency(); // returns 440 
var name = n.latin(); // returns "A" 
var octave = n.octave(); // returns 4

 

The full example (with sound, if you’ve turned on the Web Audio setting as mentioned above) can be seen here: musicjs demo.

More info about web audio and related stuff can be found on this blog post: http://pixelist.info/web-audio-it-is-finally-almost-here/

]]> 1028 The Rebirth of Rebirth! http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2010/06/12/the-rebirth-of-rebirth/ Sat, 12 Jun 2010 13:12:30 +0000 http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/?p=747

ReBirth faithfully emulates dance music’s three backbone devices: The Roland TB-303 Bass synth and the Roland TR-808 and 909 drum machines. Combine these with FX units, fully featured pattern sequencers and a quick-acting, scalable iPhone interface and you’ll soon be making techno on the train, trance on the tram or beats on the bus.

Rebirth is one of the reasons that made me switch to macs, more than ten years ago. It was an incredibly user-friendly piece of software with which you could easily create all sorts of electronic tunes, from the most acid-sounding techno lines to drum and base tracks. It was still the age of OS9, iMacs and the colorful iBooks.. then with the advent of osX Rebirth wasn’t supported anymore, and it turned into a museum.

So now seeing it reborn into an iPhone app is just amazing. It’s available on the Apple Store for 3.99 pounds (link). I bought it and had a go: the sound is as great as the original, but unfortunately controlling the interface is not as much fun. The iPhone is just too small in my opinion… but I guess that if you could run it on the iPad that would change everything (I don’t have one, but I suppose it just should scale up as needed).

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A couple of related audio&iPhone links:

– GravSynth: an analog synthesizer, fun to use.

– MobileSynth: a google project providing foundational open source iPhone code for building synthesizers.

]]> 747 SoundManager 2 makes it easier to play sounds using Javascript http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2009/05/07/soundmanager-2-makes-it-easier-to-play-sounds-using-javascript/ Thu, 07 May 2009 10:26:57 +0000 http://magicrebirth.wordpress.com/?p=137 picture-11

By wrapping and extending Flash 8’s sound API, SoundManager 2 brings solid audio functionality to Javascript.

Basic API Features (Flash 8 )

  • Load, stop, play, pause, mute, seek, pan and volume control of sounds from Javascript
  • Events: onload, whileloading, whileplaying, onfinish and more
  • ID3V1 and ID3V2 tag support for MP3s (title, artist, genre etc.)

Shiny Flash 9 Features

  • Full-screen MPEG-4 video (HE-AAC/H.264) and audio support
  • “MultiShot” play (layered/chorusing effects)
  • Waveform/frequency spectrum data
  • Peak (L/R channel volume) data
  • Audio buffering state/event handling
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