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 >>
March 13, 2009 at 5:00 pm |
[...] Flash Sequencer with Popforge By svbhikha http://blog.barcinski-jeanjean.com/2008/01/13/flash-sequencer-with-popforge/ [...]
March 23, 2010 at 7:03 pm |
You have a wide variety of apps on this site. I have had a look at the popforge Classes and can get as far as loading a wav and applying some effects to it using the modified SoundFactory Class from http://www.signar.se.
But Im not a developer and do not use Flex. So Im a bit stuck. If you have time, could you give me some pointers as to how to use multiple wav sources to use in a sequencer? Is that what you have done here or did you make a .rom?
March 24, 2010 at 11:20 am |
Hi Martin, A good resource to see how to build a multitrack sequencer is the FL909 app from Andre Michelle. It’s available for download at googlecode: http://popforge.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/flash/FL909/src/de/popforge/widget/fl909/.
But if you really want to go down that path it may be time to start using Flex or FDT to code your projects. I can’t imagine building such a project using the Flash IDE.
This sequencer is a modification of the FL909 as described in the article above. It loads separate wav files rather then one big rom file. For the separate wav files I used URLLoader to load the files and then passed the data (ByteArray) to the WavFormat class to decode the file and the WavFile class to get the amplitudes. Once you have the amplitudes you can use them in the Popforge engine.
But do note that the popforge library is quite outdated. It relies on the very unreliable SOUND_COMPLETE event. Dynamic audio in Flash 10 is way more reliable, less performance heavy and allows you to load MP3′s instead of WAVs as samples.
Keep an eye out on Andre Michelle’s blog as he announced the release of AudioTool 1.0 this thursday, which might help you a lot with what you’re trying to do.
June 15, 2010 at 5:49 pm |
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