Mac people love to believe that Macs don’t crash. Which isn’t true.
When a program crashes on the Mac, it’s quiet. It closes without an error message and goes away.
When a program crashes on Windows, you get a big error message and an announcement that it’s sending crash data to Microsoft.
What’s the lesson? Slink away quietly when you screw up an hope no one notices? I’m not sure, but Mac people sure are a happy bunch.
If your music and sound collections seem like outwardly-expanding universes, two new tools promise to bring order by representing media as virtual planets and stars. One works on albums and tracks on the iPad; the other uses computer-aided analysis of loops and samples (not just music) on Windows. One will make your eyeballs pop; one might help you manage gigs of samples for a game design project.
Built in the open-source framework Cinder by an all-star team of media artist-designers (Ben Cerveny, Tom Carden, Jesper Sparre Andersen and Robert Hodgin), Planetary should satisfy space nuts and eye candy lovers. The metaphor is pretty direct: artists are stars, albums are planets around the artists, tracks are moons around the planets, and you can filter “constellations” by letter. That means the actual structure is heavily hierarchical, actually, in the tradition of iTunes (and, before it, its predecessor SoundJam). I’m not sure what happens with, say, compilations. But let’s face it: the real draw is that it’s incredibly beautiful to look at. I’d be just as entertained looking at a visualization of my system folder if it looked this pretty.
For now, Planetary is some fascinating eye candy with at least basic playback capabilities, iPad-only. That brings some good news – Airplay wireless works, and since it makes use of standard media code, even features like Last.fm scrobbles function. It also brings some bad — while Apple added support for libraries to third-party apps, Home Sharing isn’t included, so you’re limited to what’s on your iPad. Playlists aren’t supported, either. But hook this up to a projector or large screen TV with some of your favorite music, and I don’t think you’ll be complaining. And as a free tool, it’s incredible.
Planetary is available now; free for the iPad. As seen on creativeapplications.
http://planetary.bloom.io/
iTunes link
Less pretty, but with greater facilities on the utility side, is the Windows-only Soundtorch. (Thanks to Kristian Gohlke for the tip!) Visually, it offers a similar metaphor: media assets live on a continuous plane. Functionally, though, it’s more algorithmic than hierarchic, using something called the Computer Aided Sound Exploration engine (C.A.S.E.). The set of algorithms, which the creators say were based on evaluation of human listening, performs a sophisticated set of extractions of some 600 features from each sound file.
Rather than limit itself to albums and tracks, C.A.S.E. is tuned for audio files and loops. It’s fast enough that it can plow quickly through gigs of material. So, if you’re on Windows and have amassed an enormous collection of loops, samples, field recordings, sound effects, and the like, Soundtorch will use C.A.S.E. to first map all those relationship, then visualize them. You can use the mouse to produce new collections of assets, map relationships visually, export those relationship to XML, copy sounds to the clipboard, export to WAV, or open them in Windows Explorer. That is, all that eye candy is a genuine interface, not a barrier between you and what you might do (as so often happens with these sorts of experimental interfaces).
In fact, you might argue that, despite outward appearances, Soundtorch is entirely different from Planetary, but they share one common conceptual assumption. Related media “orbit” or attract to common materials. The difference is that Soundtorch is relational. In Soundtorch, if you “magnetize” a file, it – and any similar files – become attracted to attractors called “magnets.”
As is appropriate searching for media, the “torchlight” metaphor shines a light through files. Everything under the light plays back simultaneously, so you don’t have to audition sounds one at a time. (That sounds slightly terrifying to me, but I have to spend more time with it in an actual library.)
The creators describe the magic thusly:
Have you ever listened to a sound and felt that there was a similar one somewhere on your hard disk? And the sound you can’t find would just work so much better right now? Well, Soundtorch also remembers all sounds that you ever listened to. Just select any sound on Soundtorch, and let the system suggest the most similar ones from your whole collection.
In other words, SoundTorch is as much about what you can’t see as what you can – the intelligence to determine similarity behind the scenes. Check out the tech talk in the video above for more information on how “aurally and visually-enhanced audio search” could also apply this technology. More research at:
http://www.accessive-tools.com/
Soundtorch 2.0 entered a free public beta last week. It was developed in Microsoft’s C#-based XNA framework.
Grab the download:
http://soundtorch.com
Finally, if you want to hear the “Optimist” track by Zoe Keating without that voiceover and just enjoy Planetary’s gorgeous visuals, here you go:
From innovation in the visual interface to the intelligence underneath that changes how the computer interprets relationships between files, finally, there’s hope. Music and sound might not forever be trapped in views borrowed from spreadsheets, tables modeled on the needs of accountants 30 years ago.
Attention, 3D fans: OpenGL in the browser has gradually gotten real. WebGL is a browser-friendly API for OpenGL graphics, and it’s pretty darned close to OpenGL ES 2.0, which in turn will be familiar to anyone doing modern mobile 3D development. WebGL isn’t part of HTML5, but HTML5 makes it possible: the Canvas element is what allows WebGL to work its magic. And WebGL goes nicely with technologies that are part of HTML5 or modern browser experiments, including the web audio API and browser video support. (The superb 20 Things I Learned About Browsers & The Web has a 3D in the browser section, well worth reading.) And you can use JavaScript (among other modern languages) to code 3D creations.
If you love the idea of sharing 3D as easily as a webpage, this is big news. It’s a huge step forward from the clunky, unpredictable, confusing use of Java for browser OpenGL, and unlike that solution, it’s part of the page on which it’s delivered, not part of a plug-in or launched app.
In recent days, we’ve seen the first stable browser with WebGL enabled by default, Google Chrome. Right now, Chrome or Firefox 4 beta are likely the easiest and most stable way to test WebGL graphics. I’ve been testing Firefox 4 beta on Linux and more recently the stable Chrome on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and it’s pretty fantastic.
Read Google’s announcement from Thursday, along with the other enhancements to Chrome:
A dash of speed, 3D and apps
Perhaps more exciting than the Chrome update is the superb Chrome Experiments, which recently added 3D goodness, from creative tools to eye candy to useful tools like an exploration of human anatomy:
WebGL Experiments
Grabbing the latest Chrome or installing Firefox beta will let you see them, but here are a couple of picks are a cool place to start, and have videos attached if you aren’t near a bleeding-edge browser:
http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/webgl-aquarium/?f=webgl”>WebGL Aquarium, Human Engines and Gregg Tavares
Field, Gregg Tavares
I’m pretty impressed with performance of experiments like the aquarium. I’m on a fairly low-end, last generation laptop with an NVIDIA 9500M, and they run easily.
WebGL is still early in development – Chrome is the first and only stable browser with support – but we’re getting to the phase when you could actually distribute stuff with it, and it could hit prime time very soon.
Which browsers support WebGL?
Chrome’s release is a very big deal. As I write this, WebGL is available in:
Opera plans support, but no public build is available yet.
Microsoft appears not to be planning support for IE9, meaning it’s most likely to be odd man out … again. But you can get support for WebGL inside IE using the free Chrome Frame plug-in.
Really, if you want to try this out, installing Chrome is a good idea. It’s also no accident that Google’s Chrome Web App store means people with interesting creations have an avenue for distribution, which should soon also be true with an open Mozilla-based store for Firefox et al.
Can you use Processing.js with WebGL?
Yes! Processing.js is actually a pretty decent way to fiddle around with it. The caveat is that WebGL support in Processing.js is a work in progress; if you want to get deeper, you’ll probably want to get into direct JavaScript control of WebGL. But that hasn’t stopped people from making some interesting hacks and work, and it’s a great place to start. Some demos –
A Processing.js Web IDE that uses WebGL:
– and a stunning music visualizer we’ve seen here before:
What about Google’s O3D?
O3D is some impressive technology and for many of us was the first truly compelling vision of 3D in a browser. The downside – it’s currently a plug-in. But Google does sometimes live up to their “open Web” hype. They’ve said they’re focused on improving WebGL, and that they’ll take the ideas from O3D (like its scene graph) and port to JavaScript and WebGL. There’s even an early version of the work.
It’s worth reading the (official Google) Chromium blog on the matter, partly to see how they’ve come around on JavaScript performance.
Why wouldn’t you use WebGL?
This is all compelling stuff, so let’s all abandon everything we’re doing and switch to WebGL — right? Well, not necessarily:
What’s surprising to me just writing that list is, while it appears long, the advantages of WebGL are still clear, and it makes sense that some of these differences will disappear. I imagine we will still need desktop software. Google, while characterized as some sort of browser-only religion, themselves continue adding native support in their Android platform, so presumably they understand game developers and other parties want that native OpenGL access. The question may not be whether WebGL “replaces” those tools, but whether people find smarter workflows and integrated higher-level APIs to work across the platforms.
Let’s sum it up this way: if you love 3D, and if you’re an OpenGL nerd, you’re in very happy times, indeed.
And regardless, you get to watch a cool jellyfish in Chrome any time you need to unwind.
http://www.khronos.org/webgl/
http://planet-webgl.org/
More info and downloads on Koji’s site.
As you may have guessed it is Mac only. If you know of any similar projects for Windows or Linux don’t hesitate to leave a comment below!
Update: Here’s another AS3 library + socket server app for Mac.
Update 2: Also check out as3kinect.org.
Software is increasingly a medium for artists. That to me raises really deep questions about platforms, and whether you’ll have freedom with the platforms you use. A gig’s a gig, and there’s nothing wrong with using these tools to accomplish jobs. But on the other hand, for the same practical (not even philosophical) reasons, the ability to modify the platform when you push past its capabilities is essential.
The ability to take your creations and run them on a variety of mobile devices - and how much freedom you have with the tools on which they’re built — is a key issue in 2009, as mobile platforms coalesce.
As I see people making amazing artwork with code, and then we have this question of which of our semi-disposable devices will actually be able to run stuff, I think this is as much an artistic question as a technological question. So it’s worth evaluating how three big players are doing at the moment. And this isn’t just to advocate open source for the sake of it: a big question is whether you’ll be able to write code and get it on mobile screens around the world.
Adobe has grabbed some headlines - and some skepticism - over their Open Screen Project. As Google did early on with Android, there’s a bounty for developers ($10 million). But it’s the “open” bit that has had some folks scratching their heads. After all, Adobe is one of the world’s biggest vendors of proprietary, boxed software. That’s not a criticism, necessarily, but it may make you wonder what these “open screens” are about.
Via the FAQ, here’s the answer - and a decent overview of where Adobe is so far:
That’s a pretty admirable record. The only problem - and it’s a big one — you don’t see Flash Player and AIR. They may be license-free, but they’re simply not open-source. It’s these players that really make the experience of playing content work. So Adobe means only that they want to open components of this, and make their proprietary players work better on mobile devices. That’s a worthy goal, but it means you’re fundamentally constrained in terms of what Flash and AIR can do.
So, in other words, Adobe actually turns out to be surprisingly open, but the screens themselves? Not so much.
Then again, this does compare very favorably to Microsoft Silverlight. Fewer portions of Silverlight are open in any sense - the Dynamic Language Runtime is, under a license Microsoft made up, as is the XAML format on which Silverlight creations are based. But that doesn’t include any of the meat of what Silverlight is, and it’s a far cry from Adobe’s entirely open specs and Flex framework. Microsoft is working with Novell on an open-source implementation for Mono — good for Linux and Mono developers, but because it is providing access only to a limited group of people, doesn’t really count as open. And Silverlight’s mobile strategy is murky (Windows Mobile, Symbian for now).
The closed nature of Silverlight means it’s not getting adapted as quickly or effectively on different platforms and OSes. In other words, people may just not use it. That’d be no great loss, except that a lot of what’s going into Silverlight is actually very good. And it’s not unfair to expect more of Microsoft. Part of the success of Windows comes from the fact that its APIs are so exhaustively documented. And the fact that the company has made small steps into the open source world demonstrates that at least some of the people who work at this gigantic company do get it. I just get the sense that the old business model dies hard. It’s their loss, given that they do stand to make more money if Silverlight is more popular, via support and tooling.
The good news is, both Microsoft and Adobe are responding to a competitive marketplace by opening things up, because it makes business sense. The bad news is, Microsoft isn’t doing it very well, and while Adobe is performing reasonably well, the crown jewels are still proprietary.
And that brings us to JavaFX. Sun earns real points here for being way ahead of Adobe and Microsoft on both compatibility and open licensing.
Compatibility: While Adobe pursues a patchwork approach to getting Flash running on different platforms, the just-released JavaFX Mobile runs just about everywhere. Any Java ME device works. Just about any mobile OS should work in theory - Google’s Android, for one, was shown last year.
Openness: Adobe is “openish,” but JavaFX is getting close to being genuinely open. The compiler is open, though, in fairness, so is the Flex framework. The key is that we’re gradually getting additional libraries and APIs. And since JavaFX runs on Java, the platform itself is open. I’m running JavaFX apps right now on Linux using Java SE. There is no “player” as with Flash, but the bottom line is, with JavaFX you can run your creation on open code; with Flash, you run on proprietary code. And that’s not just a semantic point - here on Linux, there are things that just don’t work or don’t work well because Flash is proprietary. Audio and video work better in Java, particularly on Linux, because people have the freedom to fix stuff. (Out of all the “freedoms,” freedom from borked things to me ranks pretty high.)
So, what do you think, CDMers? Any of these platforms appealing?
I hope to check in with the JavaFX folks next week. For arts use, I’d love to see JavaFX, possibly even a JavaFX-ready rendition of Processing for mobile, and OpenFrameWorks on mobile devices. If you have some questions, I’ll try to get answers.
Background:
Adobe Open Screen Project
OpenLaszlo (open rich clients, but apparently no mobile version yet)
Silverlight @ Wikipedia
JavaFX FAQs
OpenJFX Project
