Comments on: A virtual 303, 909 & effects setup in your browser!

A virtual 303, 909 & effects setup in your browser!

6am — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:16:21 -0800

303, 909, FX, MIXER = ACID VARSITY. In other words, two virtual 303s, a 909, effects and a mixer running for free right in your browser.

By: 6am

6am — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:21:21 -0800

If I only had a better work computer...

By: spiderskull

spiderskull — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:27:07 -0800

Wow -- this is surprisingly high quality. It's like an upgraded Rebirth without the pesky installation (and cross platform, no less!).

By: neustile

neustile — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:30:37 -0800

Very cool. Anybody know how this is done? the UI is all in Flash but the audio output seems to be java (and I didn't think you could do much synthesis in flash anyway)

By: Burhanistan

Burhanistan — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:32:20 -0800

Very nice.

By: goodnewsfortheinsane

goodnewsfortheinsane — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:35:58 -0800

Bwaaaaaaaohwwww. This is good.

By: empath

empath — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:38:04 -0800

Joy

By: uncleozzy

uncleozzy — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:39:35 -0800

This is just fantastically cool. I don't really have the patience to actually make music with old-school synth interfaces, but it sure is fun to play with at work.

By: spiderskull

spiderskull — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:46:00 -0800

Now if only there were a global sequencer or some way to record automation...

By: Sys Rq

Sys Rq — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:46:56 -0800

Wow, how very Roland-centric! Even the virtual pedals are all Boss-y.

By: Unicorn on the cob

Unicorn on the cob — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:47:14 -0800

OH MY GOD TASTES LIKE AWESOME!

By: Thorzdad

Thorzdad — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:03:54 -0800

Very sweet. Makes me want to take my SH101 back from my son and play along.

By: Nelson

Nelson — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:07:33 -0800

I can imagine this is awesome. But after triggering a signed Java applet alert, a demand for a Flash upgrade, and a request to unblock ports in my firewall I designed not to find out.

By: Nelson

Nelson — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:07:58 -0800

er, "I decided not to find out". good snark ruined by think-o.

By: phaedon

phaedon — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:19:12 -0800

Holy shit this is fun.

By: neustile

neustile — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:26:33 -0800

Very cool. Anybody know how this is done? the UI is all in Flash but the audio output seems to be java (and I didn't think you could do much synthesis in flash anyway) If anybody cares, I did some poking around. The flash talks to java over a socket (which is why nelson got a firewall message, but I think it's harmless relatively, just talking to another process on the same machine.) Java does all the audio output, and uses some tech from Mandolane for mixing on the client. I can't yet figure out if flash or java is doing the actual synthesis computation. If it were me I'd be using jsyn and java to do it but I can't find any of those jars.

By: 40 Watt

40 Watt — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:37:56 -0800

*head explodes*

By: acb

acb — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 10:39:28 -0800

Is it synthesising the audio in the browser, or is it communicating with a remote server and streaming audio back from it?

By: orbit

orbit — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:03:11 -0800

Well there goes my productive weekend. Thanks for posting 6am.

By: xbonesgt

xbonesgt — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:09:41 -0800

oh, hell yes. Thanks for an awesome post.

By: Kyol

Kyol — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:33:38 -0800

Sweet, it has a screensaver mode after a period of inactivity. The lights go down and you are left staring at a bunch of glowing LEDs. Glowing, utterly incomprehensible LEDs. *pokes and prods*

By: bobot

bobot — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:40:26 -0800

Wow, this is seriously fun. I just lost a half hour of work to it. THE HORROR.

By: hellphish

hellphish — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:54:09 -0800

I can't scroll up! all I see are the pedals and the bottom of the synths.

By: feloniousmonk

feloniousmonk — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:54:28 -0800

wow, this is incredible.

By: stenseng

stenseng — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:55:38 -0800

I can't scroll up! all I see are the pedals and the bottom of the synths. Just click in some deadspace and drag the window around.

By: hellphish

hellphish — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 11:58:03 -0800

Thanks stenseng.

By: davehat

davehat — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:02:44 -0800

16 and a half shapes of great - there goes all my free time this evening....

By: Rafaelloello

Rafaelloello — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:22:25 -0800

Tutorial

By: neustile

neustile — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:42:00 -0800

So on their FAQ they talk about how it can work without Java. This then must mean that they are doing all the synthesis computation in actionscript and can also optionally output PCM samples in flash directly (flash 9 only, it's still very wonky.)

By: Outlawyr

Outlawyr — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:01:14 -0800

great find. thanks for posting this.

By: chimaera

chimaera — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:25:23 -0800

Oh, hell yes.

By: DecemberBoy

DecemberBoy — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:05:03 -0800

Wow, this is totally awesome. So it's actually doing some kind of software synthesis, and not just playing a bunch of oneshot samples? Killer. It's like ReBirth in your browser. The snob in me, though, wants to say "YOU CAN'T EMULATE A 303!", and that every attempt has fallen short, since the magic of the 303 is in the portamento and the wacky 3-pole (I think) filter, and no one really understands how they do what they do. You can make 303-ish sounds on a SH101 or MC202, but true acidheads will know the difference. If you trigger a 303 with external CV without using the builtin interface, it sounds like a really cheap monosynth (which it basically is). However, the idea is so incredibly cool that I won't. Er, wait.

By: klangklangston

klangklangston — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:07:20 -0800

Any way to export the sound? Because I'm not wasting another half hour if I can't output...

By: DreamerFi

DreamerFi — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 15:07:42 -0800

We might as well open the vote for "Post of the Year" right now... Thanks!

By: acb

acb — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:19:40 -0800

There is no way that that is doing the DSP computations required to emulate oscillators, filters and effects in ActionScript. IIRC, ActionScript is a dialect of JavaScript, a language whose only type is the string. If it's performing string manipulations for each sample it processes, it would take a lot more than 2GHz to produce acceptable performance. I suspect that either (a) Flash has an audio subsystem comprised of a number of primitive unit generators such as filters, wavetable oscillators and convolutions, written in C/C++, and ActionScript functions for assembling and running networks of these, or (b) the synthesis code runs on a remote server and the Flash applet just sends knob movements to it and streams the audio back. But if this is doing the actual synthesis in ActionScript, I'll eat my hat.

By: neustile

neustile — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:40:06 -0800

There is no way that that is doing the DSP computations required to emulate oscillators, filters and effects in ActionScript. IIRC, ActionScript is a dialect of JavaScript, a language whose only type is the string. I did some searching. It is in flash. Andre Michelle worked on it. He says: The underlying audio engine is based on dynamic digital signal processing to provide very complex audio compositing in Flash. Here's some of his previous work: TR-909 emulator in pure Actionscript, 303 clone in actionscript, Flanger in actionscript.

By: neustile

neustile — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:42:14 -0800

ps please don't eat your hat, it's not good for you. I am very surprised as well (delightfully so, as I am trying to get some complex audio stuff on the web)

By: pyramid termite

pyramid termite — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 21:32:13 -0800

those pedals really make it something different - now why didn't the rebirth people think of that?

By: p3t3

p3t3 — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 01:04:26 -0800

Saw this a few weeks back when it got a write-up on CDM (good site to bookmark for computer audio geeks, btw), but you had to sign up for beta accounts to play with it back then and I never bothered. Nice to see it's progressing quickly, performing pretty well, and fun to play with too :)

By: awfurby

awfurby — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 07:45:12 -0800

It's great, and fun to play with, and I realise that for the sake of verisimilitude that all the instruments shown have to have knobs, but please can music software developers stop making us use knobs that are designed to be twiddled with fingers and not mice? (So many opportunities for knob jokes, but I refrain, I refrain...)

By: juv3nal

juv3nal — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 02:15:10 -0800

Hey does anyone know how you get a single beat accent (the default patterns sometimes have brighter lights than if you click on a beat yourself)?

By: Sys Rq

Sys Rq — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 10:24:35 -0800

can music software developers stop making us use knobs that are designed to be twiddled with fingers and not mice? This. Please. Switching from one piece of software to the next -- especially among VST plugins -- the user is constantly forced to figure out the idiosyncrasies of their respective knobs. Sometimes they need vertical mouse action, sometimes horizontal; once that's figured out, there's still the matter of how much movement is required for each degree of knob rotation, as some knobs are more sensitive than others. And then sometimes it's necessary to click the knob and rotate around it... It's pretty dang annoying. So, yeah: Faders or go home. (Bonus points if each fader has a little text box for entering exact values.)