Recently in Flash Audio Category

Ever year at MAX I discover a new Flash audio application. When I rejoined Adobe in 2007 it was the audio editor/remix tool called Digimix that was one of the winners of the first Air Demo Derby. Alan Queen, the developer behind Digimix, joined Aviary last year and re-wrote the application (now called Myna) taking advantage of the latest audio APIs in Flash Player 10.
http://aviary.com/tools/myna#

Last year at MAX 2008 Andre Michelle presented his Flash audio toolbox called Hobnox. It allows you to patch together various synths, drums pads, effects pedals, etc. to create your own electronic music. The user experience is very cool and the simulated pedals and synths sound great.
http://www.hobnox.com/index.1056.en.html

This year I saw a really nice piano teaching tool called PianoMarvel which was one of this MAX Award finalists. It's a great way to use the power of Flash to help kids learn to play the piano.
http://www.pianomarvel.com/

And of course there are many others Flash audio apps out there. Here are a couple of others I've run across including...
Noteflight - Music notation tool
RemixGalaxy (formerly know as SpliceMusic) - remix tool for DJs and musicians

There are also a number of audio players on the web taking advantage of Flash including the BBC iPlayer and iHeartRadio from Clear Channel.

As the Flash platform continues to evolve I'm looking forward to discovering the next cool on-line audio experience.

-Lawson

Here's a link to a whitepaper on using Production Premium CS4 to create searchable video on the web:
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/production/pdfs/cs4_production_premium_SVWGWhitePaper.pdf

The whitepaper covers using Speech Search in Premiere Pro to extract spoken words from a video file into keywords in the XMP metadata that can then be exported to F4V or FLV using the Adobe Media Encoder. The next step in the process is to use Soundbooth CS4 to export the speech metadata into an XML file that contains cue points that can be referenced in Flash. This enables Flash developers to create custom video players that make use of these cue points to trigger specific actions/events in ActionScript. The whitepaper also includes example ActionScript 3 code to do this.

In order to make full use of this speech metadata, it's important to understand what's in the XML generated from Soundbooth CS4.

When you select File>Export>Speech Transcription in Soundbooth CS4 an XML file is created that contains cue points that conform to the Flash cue points exchange format (see example above). Each speaker along with every word is stored as a Flash cue point. Each cue point will have the start time contained in the element and is measured in milliseconds. The element stores the actual word or the number of the speaker. From there, each cue point will have a set of parameters. Each parameter is stored as a name/value pair. The parameters are source, duration, and confidence.

source refers to whether this cue point represents a speaker (numbered 0, 1, 2, 3, etc.) or a word. The two values are segmentation or transcription that refer to either the speaker number or the word respectively.

duration refers to the duration (in milliseconds) each speaker spoke or the duration (also in milliseconds) of the particular word.

confidence measures the confidence (from -1 to 100) that the transcription engine has about the particular word being correct. The higher the value the greater the confidence the engine has that the word is accurate and vice versa for lower values. A special value of -1 indicates the user has manually edited the word.

With an understanding of the XML file that Soundbooth CS4 exports, you can take advantage of the speech metadata generated in Production Premium CS4 to create searchable video experiences on the web. To see this in action we've included an example built using this workflow on Adobe.com.
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/production/videosearch/

Lawson Hancock
Charles Van Winkle

There have been some audio enhancements added to the new Flash Player, which is now available in beta on Adobe Labs:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

The new feature that was added for Flash Player 10 (aka Astro) is called “Dynamic Sound Generation.” Dynamic Sound Generation is an extension to the Sound class that plays back dynamically created audio content through the use of an event listener on the Sound object. This enables audio data generated by Actionscript to be passed to the sound card.

Tinic Uro, one of the engineers on the Flash Player team, has posted details on this new function on his blog linked below. Part 1 is some background info on audio support in the Flash Player, part 2 documents the new API and part 3 documents an additional Sound object method.
http://www.kaourantin.net/2008/05/adobe-is-making-some-noise-part-1.html
http://www.kaourantin.net/2008/05/adobe-is-making-some-noise-part-2.html
http://www.kaourantin.net/2008/05/adobe-is-making-some-noise-part-3.html

And to our friends at the Adobe Make Some Noise Campaign, we heard you. ☺

Lawson