INSPIRATION
A long time ago I remember being inspired by the Dub Selector project at Infinite Wheel, a series of Flash movies that play heavy dub reggae loops, and incorporate various ways of triggering a selection of dub sound effects, drum rolls and keyboard notes. The project gave me the idea to create a more in-depth Flash music production tool, with many preset sounds and loops, and potentially audio sequencing tools too.
MY PREVIOUS EXPERIMENTS WITH FLASH AND SOUND
This was back in the days of Flash 5 and I was a novice with Flash, I had only a basic grasp of actionscript. My first experiment was called ATG Beatbox. Here it is in all it's lo-fi glory!
Pretty basic, but quite fun to play with too! The main problem I had was getting the samples to loop properly, and to get 2 or more samples to play in sync with each other. These restrictions made the possibility of sequencing very limited, so I ended up creating it so that the user could trigger the samples manually and had to time it right to get the 2 beats in sync.
The only way I could get the samples to loop cleanly was by importing them into the fla and attaching them to keyframes in the timeline.
I later made a few other experiments, such as a piano arpeggiator which used actionscript to play different arpeggio patterns. The timing was always an issue, and I concluded that Flash makes a lousy metronome! Unfortunately I seem to have lost the source files for this project 
so I can't provide an example.
Other more recent Flash projects I have done which include an element of sound are the SoundFX Player and Artanoid Game for 76 Creative. Artanoid uses the as2 attachSound method to load the mp3 files dynamically from the server.
SOUND VISUALISATION
New to actionscript 3 is the SoundMixer.computeSpectrum method, which takes a snapshot of the current sound wave and places it into the specified ByteArray object. The values are formatted as normalized floating-point values, in the range -1.0 to 1.0. The ByteArray object passed to the outputArray parameter is overwritten with the new values. The size of the ByteArray object created is fixed to 512 floating-point values, where the first 256 values represent the left audio channel, and the second 256 values represent the right audio channel.
It is explained in more depth in the article Sound Visualization in Flash CS3 by Tom Green, which is where I found out about it in the first place.
This is something I'm still experimenting with, but here's a basic example of what it can do:
Notice that because the audio sample is being loaded from the server using the Sound.load() method, the looping of the sample is still not satisfactory. The only way to make a sample loop properly still seems to be to import it and attach it to a keyframe. Here's another more abstract example:
There are a lot more cool examples of this type of Sound Visualisation at the AS3 Sound Spectrum Contest Results Be sure to check out the winning entry, which really demonstrates the scope of what can be done using computeSpectrum.
NEW SOUND API FOR FLASH 10
I recently discovered the Hobnox AudioTool, which is exactly the type of Flash based audio tool I imagined. It's actually amazing! As it features effects, like distortion, delay & reverb, phaser, etc. I could tell that, although the interface was flash, something else was being used to process the audio. The other thing I noticed was that the timing of it's drum machines was perfect! Something I've never been able to achieve with Flash.
Further investigation of the new sound API led me to these three articles by Adobe Engineer Tinic Uro, which seem to be a direct response to the Adobe, Make Some Noise campaign:
In Part 3 of the article he provides some code for a 'seamless loop' using the new extract() method with the samplesCallback event handler. I will put this code to the test as I am sure it will lead to new projects and experiments for me, the results of which will surely appear on my site in the near future!
Other Flash projects that utilise the new sound API are Tenoran, a sampling and basic sequencing instrument, and Noteflight, a a full-featured application that displays, edits, prints and plays back music notation.
This is very cool, thank you for sharing. I can't wait to try it
Hi, I tried this out and am having trouble getting it to work. Am I supposed to have 2 different layers, one for tadpole and one for mouse_mc? Also, my transparent pixels don't seem to be attached to my mouse…
Hi Sherry
They can be on separate layers, or both the same layer, it shouldn’t matter. Did you give the movie clips instance names in the ‘properties’ panel?
Sam
Hi there, just wondering if you’d have an tips on converting this to AS3. I’m very new to Flash and have been trying to do it all day!
Thanks in advance,
bex.
very nice !!!!!!!!!!
Hi, I know this is a little late in the game and not sure if anyone is still answering questions but…
What I’m looking to do is have the sprite (tadpole) freeze on mouse over; basically a button, and resume it’s motion on rollout.
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks,
Gray
i tried it and it worked! tnx
BUT i dont understand something. The tadpoles move quite smooth with an “ease out” first of all this looks nice but i dont understand why it moves like that. Second thing is… How can i also make an “ease in” So that they start moving slowly, then get to speed, then slow down en eventually stop… ?? can anyone help??
the function called newpos() basically does the following:
1. choose a rondom point on the stage
2. rotate to face the direction of that point
3. Move toward the point while decelerating to a stop
4. Once it is not moving repeat the process
@gray
to stop them moving try changing:
if(this.hitTest(_root.mouse_mc)){ this.newpos();}
to:
if(this.hitTest(_root.mouse_mc)){
this._x = this._x;
this._y = this._y;
}
@viezzz
sorry i don’t have time to code it and test it at the moment, but you need to look at these lines of code:
this._x += dx/acceleration;
this._y += dy/acceleration;
this is the code for the deceleration.
My idea would be to calculate a halfway point between the start and end position and make the tadpole accelerate towards the halfway point, and then deccelerate away from it.
Hope this helps!
where can i get copy of whole script?
Hi.. nice work. I wanted to increase the acceleration value, but the motion stops after a while if a higher value is used.
I just don’t get it why? maybe someone can give me a hint
Sweet little function man, cheers for the explanation!