Since today I’ll be working on a small one week project, something like a workshop. I’d be glad to prepare an application for realtime visualization of audio.
I love this kind of projects: you got a limited time – 7 days should be enough to prepare a small application. Game, audio or video stuff, you name it. When you work alone, you could manage your time more precisely, there’s no one who tells you what to do and what you should avoid. It’s solely your work and you can do whatever you want to – but it has to be done before the deadline, which can’t be moved in any circumstances.
This time I’ll prepare a small audio application. No business plan, no desires to sell it. No visible sight of making money of it. Just simple fun. This app was on paper for too long and this contest made me start it.
The app will mix samples in a never-ending stream of blabs. Everything will be mixed randomly from predefined settings, adjustable by you. And most importantly you’ll be able to make your very own generator by recording audio from your computer’s Line In or Microphone input.
I want to show you some of technologies I developed during last few years. GUI widgets with loadable skins, audio processing (I made few multitrack sequencers and mixers), a slice of 3D rendering. All Model-View-Controller via PureMVC.
I want to use these technologies if you’re interested to know:
- Air 2.0 beta
- Ogg Vorbis / Alchemy
- PureMVC
- Away3D Lite
- PopForge
- BulkLoader
- DestroyToday’s Scale9Bitmap (slightly changed by me)
- Greensock TweenMax
- and a small help of my libraries.
If you want to take a few lessons from ActionScript and these areas, this project is a lovely place to start. I did not tell you? Everything I am going to produce here will be licensed as Creative Commons, open for everybody. And that doesn’t apply only to source codes, I am talking about assets, source PSDs, illustrations, samples etc.
So if you’re interested in what I am going to come up with in next 6.5 days, enjoy me on the voyage. It will be a rather fast, but very fun trip. Watch this place and Twitter stream at @mumbojumbot.
Update
MumboJumboT project is done. Read more here.
MumboJumboT: Done.
I am finally done with the MumboJumboT project.
As you may know from this blog, I recently wrote a few paragraphs about progress of the project. And there is even MumboJumboT’s Twitter stream with more detailed tweets. But — believe me, it’s hard to tell — now I am not very happy with the results and I have to confess I failed on several places.
First, as usual, I was way too optimistic. I thought I’d be able to code more and harder, but it was not really possible for several reasons. Just a few hours before I started the project I had finished another long term job and hence I was somewhat tired. Our kids were sick two days as well and on the end I was lazy too :) As you may know I planned to create a blabbing machine. And… Failed. Sorry about that, next time I’ll think twice before I start a project like this one.
But! I think even with my failures I’ve got something for you. The MumboJumboT project lite. Very lite. If you’re interested, I’d be glad to show you my humble Adobe AIR application, which you can install by clicking the badge here.
So what is it all about?
This is just an eye candy and mainly a tutorial AIR app. You can click links below to read more on how the project was done and meanwhile you can play with it.
MumboJumboT allows you to:
Load a sample song (thanks to Jakub Steiner aka Jimmac for The Sphere song from his Organic album, the other song done by me),
Load your very own Ogg Vorbis file (info on Xiph.org as well),
Play an Ogg file — actually it was not possible before, because Flash knows just MP3s. If you don’t want to get into dirty details on the Wiki page, you just need to know Ogg provides much higher quality on lower bitrates. The playback is done by Branden Hall‘s Ogg Vorbis Alchemy port, heavily altered by me for purposes of this app,
Somewhat visualize the playback.
That’s pretty much for now, so let’s continue on the code stuff.
MumboJumboT code
You can read everything about the project’s code on the documentation page of the MumboJumboT project. Please don’t forget to visit its GitHub repository.
What you will learn:
PureMVC and Startup Manager
PureMVC is a cool Model-View-Controller framework aimed to help you to create cleaner code in several languages. And its Startup Manager is a good way how to put initialization of your application in a queue, while following each Proxy requirements.
Config files
Here you can see my Proxy helping to easily parse config XML settings. The online flavour allows you to merge parsed settings with FlashVars. You can localize the app from the config XML as well, you know, it’s not a good thing to have any static text in the SWF (it obviously doesn’t apply to the logging output).
AIR Updates
Adobe AIR platform allows applications to self-update when there’s a new version available. See the code below to see how to do that:
Away3D
Away3D is a well known 3D library. And its new Lite flavour finally provides hardware acceleration via Flash 10 postcards in space acceleration features.
OGG Decoding
As I wrote above, thanks to Branden Hall I was able to use Ogg Vorbis files in the app, even it was not possible before.
Advanced mouse controls
You can see there’s a somewhat sick mouse handler allowing you to drag-and-rotate so called Spinbox.
Skinning
Here you can see how to skin the app with my vancura-as3-libs library. Download the skin folder here.
Mocking up
Just to revisit what was written in previous articles, here’s an archive of PSD files you can download. Just in case you’d be interested on how the GUI part was done.
You can watch a screencast of the mocking up on Vimeo.
Legal stuff
Licensed under Attribution-Share Alike (CC) license. OGG Alchemy Decoder by Branden Hall and Xiph.org Foundation. More info RaveIN font by Jakub Steiner aka Jimmac.