Barcinski & Jeanjean

We were working on a website project for which we wanted the music to be sequenced in Flash rather then loading an mp3, which would allow us to do realtime manipulation of the music sound and bpm. The logical place to start in that case is the wonderfull Popforge Library of André Michelle and Joa Ebert. We needed a sequencer engine to play our music in our project and a GUI to create the patterns in as a production tool.

André Michelle’s open-source FL-909 drummachine already contained a lot of functionality we needed. But as the FL-909 is based on the original Roland TR-909 hardware interface, functionality and soundbank, it was missing the flexibility and overview we needed for our production sequencer. So we modified the engine and GUI to add what we needed. The GUI now offers a complete graphic overview of the pattern as you program it. Triggers have individual velocity allowing for greater dynamics. And the samples are loaded externally one by one, rather then being embedded in one big chunk, allowing to manage the downloading process.

The application certainly doesn’t look as nice as André’s FL-909 but that wasn’t our main  concern, since the GUI would only be used by us during production and only the engine would run tranparently in the background of our project, providing the soundtrack. There were a few more modifications we wanted to implement, such as mute groups, a compressor behind the accent knob, the ability to sequence the pattern bank, to only name a few. However, the death of the SOUND_COMPLETE event (read the article and sign the petition) renders these efforts useless for commercial projects for the moment. And besides that, André Michelle and Joa Ebert are working on a complete Audio Suite in Flash which most certainly will also contain a very flexible sequencer. Have a look >>