Have you listened to the Bicycle Built for Two Thousand recording? It’s actually 2,088 different voices. It’s also a little terrifying. I’m a little disappointed the author didn’t get 2,001 voices.
Actually, I’m a little more intrigued by what was used to capture the audio for these 2,000 recordings. I recently found a nice project on Google Code called jpegcam for capturing snapshots from the user’s built-in webcam and have been looking for something similar to use for capturing audio.
So far I’m having a surprising amount of trouble finding a solution so I’m making a list. It goes:
Google Gears AudioAPI
Google Gears has documentation for an AudioAPI that looks work perfectly for this, but there are two tiny problems: The first is it would require the user to have Google Gears installed in their browser. I love Gears, but I’m not sure what percentage of users are running on it right now, and every time you require a plugin you lose some percentage of users, however small. I suppose you can make the same, if not better, argument against a Flash-based solution too. However, its ubiquity just about trumps that argument for me – if you want to deal with audio and visual media on the web, you’re going to need Flash. At least for the next few years.
Processing
The guys who built the Bicycle for Two Thousand that said they used an open-source programming language called Processing for acquiring their audio samples. It looks like a fun and versatile language for audiovisual applications, but I haven’t taken the time to play around with it yet. Looking through the documentation, I think it would require deploying a Java Applet. I have mixed feelings about that – Java applets feel like relics from the mid to late nineties and most of them are slow.
Do you have anything to add? I’ll update this post with findings as people leave them in the comments.
{ 1 comment }
I’m not sure if you are going to be able to get a Flash based solution that is as simple as jpegcam.
I have been looking through the Adobe documentation (which is a complete mess) and as far as I can tell there isn’t as convenient a way of dealing with recorded audio as video.
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/main/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=LiveDocs_Parts&file=00001863.html
To quote: “The Microphone class is primarily for use with Flash Media Server but can be used in a limited fashion without the server, for example, to transmit sound from your microphone through the speakers on your local system.”
So, basically to get the audio you need to send it to a Flash Media Server, which will run you from $995 to $4000.
So, you might consider the Google Gears approach…
(I could also be completely wrong about this, but the lack of a simple solution like jpegcam seems to support this conclusion)
Comments on this entry are closed.