It’s Flash 909, and Amiga Flash.

Code wizard Andre Michelle has already made a name hacking audio capabilities into Adobe Flash and ActionScript 3. We got to see his work in the form of real-time audio effects processing in the GarageBand-like online sample-and-compose interface for Splice:

Interview: How Splice.com Has Taken Music Real Audio Processing to the Web

Well, there’s more, well into the “Things Adobe Wouldn’t Normally Expect People to Do With Flash” category. There’s 8BitBoy (warning: link autoplays music), a Flash-based player for Amiga MOD tracker tunes. There’s a 909 emulation (cutely named FL-909). There’s open ActionScript 3 source called popforge [@ Google Code] with all the Flash-hacking tricks needed to do audio.

Now, the most tantalizing bit yet: Andre has a new music environment coming, and to tease its arrival, he’s put up a little application with Roland emulations and stompboxes — and it’s all part of the Rich Internet Application of the Future:

If you’ve been on the search for a simple, straightforward audio editor for Mac and Windows, Adobe has officially thrown its hat into the ring with Soundbooth CS3.

Soundbooth Now Shipping [Hart's Audition, from the Adobe audio product chief]
New Soundbooth User-to-User Forum

Of course, to the rest of the world, the big news is that Adobe’s full Production Premium and Master Collection suites are shipping. But Soundbooth is one program that could make sense to buy alone, as a basic audio editor. It sets itself apart both by being cross-platform and by being geared for beginners and people wanting a simple, streamlined tool. And the killer feature: there’s a lasso tool you can use directly on the audio spectrum. I’ve been using that to isolate sounds in field recordings that would otherwise be impossible to grab.

I hope to have an in-depth look at the finished tool soon, so no conclusions about the shipping software yet, but in the meantime, see our preview from the beta.

Chris O’Shea sends along his latest project, a collaboration with sound designer and composer Owen Lloyd called Drop Spin Fade. Part of the Future of Sound tour, Drop Spin Fade allows users to position, sculpt, and play with sound in a 3D environment using gestural control.

Drop Spin Fade

The music/sound environment: Through a series of iterations, Chris and Owen have started simple and built increasingly-sophisticated sonic control using the setup, manipulating granular samples by spinning and bouncing them around the space. It’s not just positioning at work here: you can actually shape the sounds you’re hearing by interacting with the geometric forms in the environment. Eventually, the designers hope to give users more compositional control, making this into a kind of 3D sequencer.

The guts behind the scenes: The work was built to showcase the Illustrious positional sound system, which can use positioning data to create 3D sound environments. For control, the project uses the Gametrak game controller hardware, which you may have seen used in inexpensive golf and other sport games. It happens to be a very nice gestural controller, as well, with extremely low latency when compared to video camera tracking solutions. Visuals and hardware interface are performed in Adobe Director, routing positional control to Illustrious via MIDI and playing a live sound patch built in Max/MSP via OpenSoundControl data. There will be yet another piece as work proceeds on support for the Nintendo Wii controller.

I’m actually quite surprised that more work hasn’t been done with 3D interfaces — though I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised, as it’s extremely labor intensive! 3D has focused largely on positioning, but with powerful hardware and software capabilities bring 3D to the masses, 3D interfaces are surely next. Iterations and shared research are vitally important to any medium advancing, so I hope we’ll have more projects in this area. (I happen to be working on something different but related in the 3D space in my own research, which I’ll share when I’m ready.)

Previously from Chris O’Shea land: Muon Speakers, with Processing Visuals

Okay, Akai. You’re going to have to get on the ball, fast. Sure, the new MPCs have all kinds of sophisticated music production capabilities. But can they remix the sultry, animal call of The Cheat, or make the ladies swoon with a solo by Strongbad?*

Onetwo, short video made with looping … uh … things [Homestarrunner.com]
Onetwomixer: MixMastah 800 for mixing it yourself

Yes, a lot of these Flash-based remix tools / mash-up gimmicks have been somewhat … limited … musically-speaking. But this is strangely fun. I dare you to use it live. (If they had only played up the “mash-up” angle, maybe they might have gotten mentioned in Wired. Sigh.)

*Oh, and Akai/MPC fans: I’m kidding.

Adobe’s new audio application, compatible with Intel Macs and Windows PCs, has been formally announced today. CDM was one of the first sites to look in-depth at Soundbooth CS3 back in the fall, and we broke the story that the software would be available as a standalone. Now we have a little bit more in the way of details: Soundbooth will ship in “third quarter” or “summer” (depending on which language you read), and it’ll ship with the CS3 Production Suite. I’m a little disappointed that Adobe chose not to ship it as part of the Design suite, since part of the product’s vision was to help people using tools like Flash get into audio, but then again, I think Adobe retained something to “upsell” to.

The good news is, you’ll be able to buy Soundbooth standalone for US$199. And that sets Adobe apart from Apple’s Soundtrack Pro, which requires you buy Final Cut Studio.

Interestingly, this leaves Audition Pro as exclusively a standalone app. Adobe has promised it isn’t abandoning Audition, though. I think this makes some sense: Audition is really geared at the audio production market. The people who are experts in Photoshop, Flash, After Effects, and so on are more likely to want a streamlined tool like Soundbooth, and hire someone else to do audio production. Well, unless they’re one of the multi-disciplinary creatives who read this site, of course, in which case they may go all-out.

Adobe has put together a product comparison with Audition. It basically breaks down to this:

Visual Acoustics is an online musical toy built in Flash designed by Alex Lampe (”Ample Interactive”) of the UK. (Via Music Thing.) The motion visuals are beautiful, and the music and interface is very reminiscent of Toshio Iwai’s work (see Nintendo’s ElectroPlankton, for instance). As with Iwai’s designs, just about anything you play will sound good and ambient. Now, there are two schools of thought on that. One suggests that these kind of futuristic interfaces make music accessible to anyone. The other would hold that part of what makes traditional musical instruments lovely is that, while they take a long time to learn, the rewards are much deeper. I’m not sure one is inherently better than the other, but I still wonder if it isn’t possible to build visual interfaces that are harder to master but deeper to play.

If you want some inspiration for moving in either direction, Visual Acoustics certainly shows potential. Now you just need a Wacom tablet-enabled version that, rather than conventional sliders for parameters, adjusts to gesture and pressure.

Adobe product manager Hart Shafer confirms on his blog that Soundbooth, Adobe’s new audio editor, will ship both as part of Creative Suite 3 and as a standalone product. Apparently I’m not the only one who wanted to see a standalone version:

Soundbooth Beta 2 Article

Given that Audition is already bundled in the Windows video production suites, maybe this means Mac bundle customers and lower-end customers will also see the app as an included product, which would be nice. We’ll know soon enough.

Equally interesting is the reaction Soundbooth is already generating. Apparently me comparing an audio editor to Photoshop pricked up some ears:

Adobe Soundbooth Beta 2: Now Easier, More Photoshop-y [digg]

And, of course, digg’s trolls immediately took to the comments. One good idea out of the discussion: OGG export, which has a lot of appeal to me and wouldn’t even require a license fee for Adobe. Mac users are still understandably upset that there’s no PowerPC version, but given the availability of Sound Studio and Peak LE, and the Intel-specific optimizations in the Intel-native Soundbooth, this argument seems like a waste of time.

Are Graphics Tools Intuitive?

More interesting, though, a lot of readers were upset that I called Photoshop intuitive. Personally, I think the basic lasso editing tool and graphical painting metaphors are quite intuitive, and I think a spectral view is one of the best ways to visualize sound. These metaphors have become so familiar to computer users, in fact, that we forget they weren’t the creation of Adobe Photoshop at all. The lasso tool, and most other paint tools that are now as second-nature to us as windowed interfaces, are the invention of Bill Atkinson, while developing MacPaint for the original Mac (pictured at right, courtesy folklore.org):

Can sound editing be as intuitive as graphics editing in Photoshop? That’s the question Soundbooth, the new Adobe sound app, poses.

I’ll give Adobe this: they know their audience. First, they woo audio fans with this sweet-sounding phrase: “A brand new audio application in the spirit of Sound Edit 16 and Cool Edit 2000.” Then, they throw in some tools from Photoshop, just to make sure everyone feels at home.

The good news is, Soundbooth betas show a lot of promise: it could well become the simple audio editor “for the rest of us”. Not everyone needs the full feature set of tools like Audition on Windows or Peak Pro on the Mac (and Soundtrack Pro, before Apple annoyingly decided to give it only to Final Cut buyers). As we saw in my preview of the first beta, Audition offers a really elegant way to edit, taking some of the best of all these programs and packaging them in a single, streamlined tool. This is still a beta, so it’s too soon to say for sure how well the finished product will work — and readers immediately pointed to some missing functionality they wanted to see. But it’s already great fun to play with, and getting more so fast.

Today, Adobe launched beta 2, with some nice new extras. Hart’s Audition, the blog of Adobe audio product manager Hart Shafer, has the full list of additions:

Adobe seems to have baffled the Mac community by announcing that its upcoming audio utility Soundbooth, profiled here earlier this week, would run on Intel Macs but not PowerPC Macs. MacInTouch immediately cried foul, and suddenly the Mac world, having spent the past year yelling at Adobe for not releasing Intel-native code, has begun yelling at Adobe for releasing code only for Intel.

The first response came over the weekend from Adobe’s John Nack on his personal blog, waxing largely philosophical about why it made sense to support the newer Intel Macs instead of the PowerPC platform Apple themselves had abandoned. Now, I’ll be the first to concede Mac users can be hotheaded, but I think the better response would be to cut straight to the technical reasons why Adobe’s developers made this choice. Mac users assume, because they’ve been told so repeatedly by Apple, that creating universal applications is a “checkbox-clicking affair.” You can see a comment to that effect in the extensive discussion Mr. Nack triggered on his site.

Adobe audio product manager Hart Shafer chimes in today with the simpler technical answer: