Flash audio analysis

date posted 25th June 2002 01:49

Can the panel answer the following query:
(many thanks for any who even attempt it)

I am currently designing a site predominantly in Flash (95%), the idea
being to showcase several groups of experimental musicians and artists.

To cut to the chase, each artist will have a selection of music and/or
video clips to be played by streaming in a movie clip within the main
Flash-site. Some of the music clips do not have an associated
visualisation and to avoid sticking a stationary or animated track title
or whatever it has been mooted to attempt to construct some form of
analytic visualisation system akin to winamp or similar. The 50p
question is how the hell do I analyse the audio stream in Flash? I know
it can't be done in ActionScript (I'd like to be proved wrong, but I
don't think so somehow), could you have some sort of server-side script
or executable generate the data and throw the values to Flash in
real-time? Or would it be easier to pre-generate the data and construct
an algorithm (or algorithms) to process it later - given that, by it's
nature, the music on the site will be static (I just hope they don't
want a radio stream doing as well)?

It isn't really an option for a human to generate a set of
visualisations for each track as this (kind of) defeats the object
(apparently), a compromise is to get the computer to generate them -
damn I knew I should never have sent them winamp...

This is not about syncing to BPMs or anything, this is about analysing
the stream to establish frequency groupings. The music does not have a
"4/4" easily defined rhythm or any set BPM for that matter. We already
have suggestions for a few algorithms to work on the data, just need a
good way of generating the data... actually implementing the algorithms
is another question for another day...

I've seen a few different systems for constructing VU meters but they
only "analyse" the relative dynamics - although actually quite useful in
a way...

Any suggestions???..please bear in mind that my programming consists of
"goodbye cruel world" in BASIC...;-) I have searched the usual suspect
Flash sites and done a general web trawl for stuff but came up with
nothing that tells me stuff I haven't already worked out...

!THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU FOR ANY HELP!

ade

P.S. If all else fails they'll get a random test-card pattern...

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junior sick-bag attendant
the funkyfish collective
[EMAIL REMOVED]
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