I’ve just stumbled upon this marvelous website!

Check the link on the bottom-right of my site, it’s eye-opening…

Ever since I first started using Flash I was always disappointed by it’s dismal support for sound. Sure, you can load sounds, play sounds and stop sounds without too much effort, hell, you can even add envelopes to a sound (albeit in design time only).

This probably suits most people fine, but I always thought you should be able to do more with sounds in actionscript, other than changing the volume or panning.

Fun as that is, it’s time for some dynamic audio processing – that’s right, code that will affect sound on-the-fly – and I’m talking about eq, filtering, flanging, delays, distortion… you name it.

One argument is that if I wanted to do that, why can’t I do it in an audio editor/sequencer? Well I suppose I could edit my sounds and import them in but I’m losing the true freedom of just being able to tweak 1 line of code and alter the sound even further. You can’t beat that ease and flexibility, you just can’t…

For my final year project at uni, way back in summer 08, I had an idea of making a sound sequencer in Flash. I knew the limitations of sound in Flash, so it would have been pretty basic or involved me importing sounds with the effects already instated. With some searching, I found a library called ‘Popforge‘ on GoogleCode, actually developed by the same guys running ‘MAKE SOME NOISE’, Andre Michelle and Joa Ebert. They were obviously tired by the lack of audio processing ability in Flash too!

It was the heaven of dynamic audio thru actionscript that I was looking for! The problem was that it used AS3, and seemed run only in Flex – two problems since I had experience in neither, so I played around for ages, gave up and ditched the idea… D’oh…

Well, things have moved on a little bit and last week I plucked up the courage to look at Popforge again. I found that the reason why it wouldn’t work in Flash was due to the way it needed to process the sound – a way with Flex supported but Flash didn’t. Fortunately, a very nice chap called Carl Fredrik altered one of the .as files in the libary and now it works in Flash, hooorayyy!

So, this is what the guys over at ‘Adobe, MAKE SOME NOISE’ are campaigning for – for the Flash Player to offer dynamic audio processing ON IT’S OWN without the need for extra libraries and classes.

My next post will no doubt be something to do with Popforge – I’m very exciting by the possibilities it offers and I can’t wait to muck around with it some more.

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