Visual Sound #1
September 9th, 2007
My newest project, Visual Sound, has many challenges involved. The first one is the migration from the programming language ActionScript 2, to the new version, ActionScript 3. If you are unfamiliar with what that means, think of it this way, you are fluent in the English language, but one day it changes, there are new words and grammar, and some words, which you use daily, no longer exist, and if you try to use them you will not be understood. That is basically what it means to me.
So this has been the first phase of the project for me. This is important because what I want to create is actually impossible without the change. I have been experimenting a lot and you could say, re-learning how to speak. While I have found this process frustrating at times, overall it has been an enjoyable experience, and I am excited by the power of ActionScript 3.
After the basic experiments and figuring out how to do all the standard things, I moved onto aspects more specific to my end goal. At the heart of what the end product will be, there must first exist standard audio player functionality. This is things such as play, stop, and pause buttons, as well as the fundamental ability for the application to load in audio files from an external source and play them for the user to hear. So this is where I was forced to begin. I won’t be posting it in its current form, but I currently have a working mp3 player, very much like something you would find on your computer, albeit, much less pretty. That is where this project is currently sitting, perhaps barely a scratch on the surface, but the needed first step.
The next step is figuring out how the grab the the information I need from an audio file, and see if I can’t get a basic output of that data, even if it’s just numerical data. Stay tuned.