audio visualizations in Flash

[Faust]

ok i have been working on this for quite some time and doubt i will figure it out on my own and like to know if others can, cuz my whole Computer Science Department here in the states can't even try (lazy ass professors)

the idea is take in streaming mp3 songs and convert it to a visualization much like Roxio and Windows Media Player does. The movement must be caused by the change of beats in the song and not randomly made.

I have been going down the track of PCM waves????

Thanks and Good Luck
Faust

[CyanBlue]

Howdy and Welcome... :)

oldnewbie posted this one a while ago...
http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/BBGorB/tutorial01.html

[Faust]

points me in the right direction but everything is pre-batch not on the fly? prevents anysong being played withouut going through the process. so it means streaming audio can't be used. but it does show me how i can take the integers of a wave file to create it, so thanks alot

Faust

[CyanBlue]

Well... I guess that's the part you need to investigate more... I think you should have some sort server side scripting language that can analize the MP3 file so that it will give you the same file analize data and have it imported into the Flash to display it... (I have no knowledge of the language which might be able to do that...) Of course, there will be another issue with synchronizing the equalizer with the streaming sound which should be addressed as well... ;)

[Faust]

hmmm good point so i was think if i could find the buffer that sends the data to the soundcard then it would be as synched as probable! anyone know where the memory location of the sound card input?

Anyone know how Microsoft Media Player does it?

[Crismo]

Using asp.net you could do it by help of DirectSound / DirectMusic or DirectShow (Or any other audio package that lets you analyze audiostreams / buffers etc). But since you want this to be “on the fly” I’m having some real concerns regarding scaling. It’s better to have a mechanism that caches this kind of data. (I know there are already apps out there, that creates movies with this kind of data).
Synchronizing it shouldn’t be such a big problem if you did the first part “smart” enough.

I just realized I made a big assumption. I was thinking that you would want this to work seamlessly over the net in a Flash application.
But you are possibly taking about a local application, where Flash is just utilized as a visiualizer ? In that case there hardly is a problem or challenge as far as Flash is concerned.

But is this a actionscript / flash challenge??

[Faust]

I guess its a mix/or actionscript and serverside from the sunds of it? i thisnk about the synch is as long as i am grabing the same data as the sound card and doing simple algorythms then the synch problem shouldn't be an issue? i mean it is streaming so if the song lags so does the data input? there for the visualization would hold as well, right? I mean it can't be that hard can it?

i mean i am trying to get this done so i can transfer as much as possible to the mobile platform and i believe that flash has the capabilites i am looking for. its pretty copmact and i believe the newer PDA's have the memory to hold the plug in? but this is a long off goal of mine not part of the challenge :( sorry but the real time representation of a local or streaming audio is a pretty key point at the moment! Sorry don't really know what that to do with it? on a side note i can load a VB.net 2003 program that does something very similar that i am looking for just not at the synch lvl i need :(

Faust