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Experimental track

I had just some fun with a beta of our audiotool with some new features such as a sample player and another freakin’ new machine coming soon.

Well I want to have this too..

Nice work..

Flash Player 10 again…

OMG, I was so much looking forward this release of flash player, but all I can tell up now is that it totally sucks. Sorry, Adobe, but you missed something.

The flash player totally messes up the redraw regions meaning that if you change a region this is not correctly repainted. See an example here:

This looks somehow crappy eh? Well, it worked before.

What never worked before: KeyCodes, but I already mentioned this in an earlier post.

There are way too many bugs to call this a release player. I have to say I am really getting more and more disappointed.

Hobnox, next level…

Hoooray.

We just released a new version of the audiotool. Check it out at hobnox.com.

Note: you need the newest flash player (FP10).

Enjoy!

Note: Sorry, but it seems that Adobe messed up something with the latency of their sound support. First it seemed as if we would have an overall, ridiculous and disappointing latency of 835 ms minimum which would make performing with the audiotool very uncomfortable.On Windows Vista this was even worse.

After some time of tearing our and the community’s hair we discovered that the sound output’s latency is defined by the length of the first buffer it gets. Every time the buffer size is increased, the latency will rise. So far so good. But, in contrast to the developer versions of the flash player, this latency will never switch back to the initial size – and I don’t see any reasons for this as this already worked …Prove me wrong..

It seems quite incomprehensible that adobe makes such critical changes between the developer beta players (where we had an acceptable latency of about 180ms) and this disappointing flash player 10 release – without notifying the developers. Well that’s bad press for us and them – we can not launch our products ‘in time’ and these products seem to be buggy, but they weren’t, up to the point adobe changed their API.

Another sound engine bug: you cannot stop playback of a sound object processing dynamic sound and restart it after a while – you have to write zero buffers into it or you will run into serious problem concerning drop-outs, buffer-repeats etc. Well, this bug isn’t new but it’s still in there..

In addition, they again missed to fix keycodes. There is an ugly bug in flash player concerning the KeyboardEvent keycodes. These seem to be always different. For example, pressing the caret key (the one left to the 1 key), I get a akeycode of 0×31 on a Macbook Pro with german keyboard layout. Andre on his macbook pro with american keyboard layout gets 0xc0. Joa on his windows ‘calculator’ again gets a different value which I don’t remember at the moment. This behavior changed with every flash player version.

I am a little disappointed.

But…

..we finally made it, at least we did what was possible. And now…..let’s make some music!!

One week ago, Joa and me had a small session with the Hobnox Audiotool connected to different midi devices to test some of the upcoming Midi features of the application.

Video presentation of the Audio Tool

Finally we released our first video tutorial of the Audio Tool. If you want to be part of the private beta program, drop me a comment.

Make some NOIZE!

For the last months I have been working on a project with Andre Michelle and Joa Ebert.

Go to hobnox.com and register for the private beta. Then connect your speakers or headphone and check out the Hobnox Audiotool.

So what is it?

The AudioTool is a new approach to offer you the possibility to create and perform music and compositions in your browser.

At this early stage it is just a teaser application, so you cannot save or load any setups, BUT you can already arrange the synthesizers – emulations of well known analogue synths by the way ;) – on an unlimited stage, reconnect them on the fly with a whole bunch of floor board effects by dragging natty cables in between them, copy patterns from one synth to another, and last but not least perform music in realtime in your browser!

There is already lot of possibilities in sound generation to explore and more to come. So go ahead and play with it!


Hobnox Audiotool

Hobnox is a company with a focus on professional browser-based tools for media production and deployment. There is a lot more to see and some really nice flash applications to come, so be sure to have a look at it.

I hope you will feel the same excitement about this project as we do. Enjoy!

Flex/As3 code completion in Xcode

Today I sat down and re-edited my xcode language definition files for actionscript3. It is now fully (as I hope.. drop me a comment if something is missing or wrong ;-) ) compatible with the final flex sdk available at www.adobe.com.

As a next “spare time project” I’m gonna extend it with the mx tags.

You can download the language specs here.

As a next step, backup your actual ActionScript.pbfilespec and ActionScript.pblangspec and replace them with the delivered files.

Enjoy.

Finding a way to recognize error messages..

I’m just looking for a way to let xcode recognize the error messages just as it does with mtasc compile errors, so that you can jump to the according position in your as3 source code. Has someone already managed this? I could not find any compiler settings that make the compiler error output compatible to xcode.. Hopefully someone has a suggestion?

So little time..

I’m working on an update for my xcode flex beta3 code completion that I will release within some days. Stay tuned.