ElectricType:Authoring : Main

Amen

This here demo can take a good while to download. It could take as long as five minutes if you have a slow connection. "How could this be?" you ask. "You're using short audio snippets, and you've got great compression like MPEG at your fingertips. Download times should be bearable for even 14.4 users."

While IE 4 may have a wide-ranging assortment of compressed A/V file formats to choose from, I've had to learn the hard way which ones will loop seamlessly and which won't. And - you guessed it - MPEG falls into the latter category, which forced me to use 8-bit, 22.050kHZ .wav files instead. Yes, there is a seamy underbelly to the Active Movie Control, and I know it all too well. So while we're waiting, let me ramble on with a few general thoughts about AMC.

One annoying (if somewhat logical) flaw of the AMC is its inability to pan mono files properly. Panning is, of course, the function of stereo pairs, but many audio software packages allow you to send a mono signal to the left or right channel. The AMC fails miserably at this, resulting in what seems more like a volume drop than anything else.

Certain methods have also been nothing but a headache, particularly the isSoundCardEnabled method, which supposedly tests to see if your PC has a sound card and if it's available for use by the Active Movie Control. I've had a dismal time trying to get this to work, and, as deadlines loomed over me, I gave up altogether. Because I couldn't get this to work, the demo will produce JavaScript errors if you don't have a sound card or if the media aren't fully loaded, which is partly why I chose this area to speak my mind, and distract you while the demo prepares itself. One other thing that I noticed was that Windows NT seemed unable to play more than one sound at a time.

Another thing that really irked me was the Active Movie Control's reluctance to change sound files and then play the sound without user interaction. It seems that even if the file is cached, the AMC will stop playing, and nothing, not even issuing the Run method from within the function that changes the source, would get the AMC to play again. This sort of error is so odd that I'm not thoroughly convinced it isn't something that I'm somehow doing. Even so, the correct way to do this should be more apparent and straightforward. Now that I've spoken my mind and vented a bit, too, it might be a good time to give you a brief primer on how the demo actually works. The first thing you should see is a menu bar of styles, with somewhat capricious names. By default, the demo is set to play at the "normal" setting; feel free to choose another setting. Directly below that are the master controls. These start, stop, and pause all the sounds on the page all at once. I have made it possible to perform these functions on the individual sounds, but since it is very hard to manually synch the sounds, I recommend that you use the master controls while working with all four sounds.

The next thing you should see are four little "men." The one on top provides the drum loop, while the three beneath him provide other random noises. These "men" provide the controls for most of the parameters of their sound, plus one specially designed "superpower," which I will discuss in a moment.

The first thing you might notice about the men is their sunny demeanors. If the men are happy, it means their sound is (or will be, when you press play) audible; if they're frowning, then their sound is muted. You can change their mood by clicking on their heads. The button directly beneath their heads are their "superpowers." To get a feel for what each does, you might want to mute all the other sounds, listen to the raw sound for a bit, and then click on the superpower. The rest of the buttons are fairly self-explanatory, but I should note that the buttons labeled Speed, Volume, and Pan will return the sound to the default setting for that parameter. That said, have fun!

STYLE
Nutter Rinsin' Rollin' Normal Trippin' Queasy Eerie

PLAY STOP PAUSE