Flash Player 10: Sound features aren’t music to my ears

Well at least it doesn’t allow me to tune my guitar using a microphone (as I was hoping the new features added to the Sound class might).

I’m currently away from my lovely Takamine acoustic guitar with built in tuner, and have a fairly dodgy classical to play with at the moment. As I don’t have my standalone guitar tuner either I started looking for applications for my phone that would allow me to tune the guitar. I found a few, but none seemed to actually do anything after installation, so I started wondering whether Flash 8, 9 or 10 might be able to do the job. I did find a reasonable flash tuner, but this didn’t make use of the microphone (like both my proper guitar tuners do). I then investigated the new Flash 10 player features only to be disappointed when I read the following (taken from kaourantin.net):

Unfortunately some features did not make it into Flash Player 10: Extracting audio data from a microphone and extracting audio from a NetStream object. We are aware that both features are highly desirable, but for various reasons it was not possible to make this happen in this release.

Adobe’s missed a good opportunity to integrate some very powerful audio capabilities into the Flash player… but I’m sure there’s a good reason for it… right?

So it’s back to tuning the good ‘ol fashion way I suppose!

6 thoughts on “Flash Player 10: Sound features aren’t music to my ears”

  1. Not to derail completely, but you could Processing in lieu of the non existent FP10. Last time I checked there were two libraries that contained an FFT implementation: Minim and Ess.

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  2. Take a quick gander here:

    http://code.compartmental.net/tools/minim/manual-fft/

    It’s quite impressive as Processing is not afraid to show off its Java innards. Don’t let the sample applet fool you a tuner is much more than a simple FFT implmentation. There’s lots of non-trivial issues at play.

    I’m currently in a bet with a co-worker on the issue of interpreting sound. Her opinion is that when analyzing sound nothing beats the sensitivity of the human ear – (she is a violinist). She also contends that digital tuners are not accurate due to the lack of sensitivity as well as the discrete nature of the digitized signal.

    I on the other hand being a firm believer of mathematics and human ingenuity am trying to prove her wrong. So far she’s winning as DSP is a fairly monolithic field.

    – X.

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