The waveform display

2010! A new year, a new decennium even! This year I want to be more consistent in publishing articles on this weblog. That’s my new year’s resolution.

The first one of the new year is more of a utility than a complete application. It’s a wave display; It loads an MP3 file and displays the sound as a graph of the waveform. It makes no sound. A simple waveform display like this might be a useful component in a larger application where audio needs to be edited. Here it’s on its own because I was figuring out how to best program such a component. So this application is more experimental than useful.

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Screenshot

The past weeks I’ve been learning PureMVC. It had been on my mind for some time, and now that a project (a pianoroll type MIDI editor) became too complicated and the lack of structure took the fun out of programming I figured it was time for a nice new clean framework.

Part of the sequencer

Here is a basic step sequencer for creating rhythms. The sounds it plays are small MP3 files. Short sound clips of drum noises, blips and plings. So it’s more a sample player than a drum synth. But the main thing is that it loads and plays rhythm patterns and that the patterns can easily be edited. That’s what I wanted to do here.

It plays patterns in the same way FL Studio (FruityLoops) does. There’s twelve tracks that each play their own sound and each track has sixteen steps that can be switched on or off by clicking the step buttons.

Besides that the volume of each step can be changed by holding the “1” (one) key on the computer keyboard while dragging the mouse up or down on the step button. The blue rectangle on the step will change in height to indicate the volume level.

The image of the waveform on the left of each track can be clicked to play the sound. And there are four patterns. Switch between them with the ‘1’ to ‘4’ buttons at the bottom.

Slicer with waveform display

This slicer works the same as the previous one. Only difference is that is uses eight slices instead of sixteen.

The new stuff is in the interface: Waveforms to see what’s playing. And nicer to look at as well.

To use this app you can click the buttons as before to select a slice to play, and now you will see the waveform change to represent the slice.

The second way to change the slices is to click and drag on the waveforms itself. Drag up for later slices and down for earlier ones. Drag all the way down for an empty slice and silence.

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Part of the slicer

This is it! The first one: A slicer.

It loads and plays an MP3 file. But not only that. It divides the file in sixteen equal parts and you can change the order in which the parts are played.

When it’s loaded the slicer plays all the parts in the right order. Part 1, 2, 3 and up until part 16. With the buttons you can change the order and for example play part 4, then 3, 11, 8 and so on. With the right MP3 loop this will create all kinds of interesting rhythmic variations.

It works best if the MP3 file is a short piece of music with a steady rhythm that loops seamlessly (so the start and end of the sound fit together exactly). Then every slice has a little bit of rhythm in it. Just one or two sounds like a kick or snare drum.

Best to check it out for yourself. I will put the actual SWF files on the ‘Read more’ pages of the posts, so they won’t all be playing at the same time and use up each other’s CPU cycles.

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