Party like it’s 1991 – your browser’s invited. A full-blown music production tool has been directly ported from the desktop to the browser using Flash, modeled with a tracker-style interface for fast, precise music editing. (In fact, a tracker, thanks to speedy entry from a QWERTY keyboard, seems to me an ideal interface for browser music. Trust me – it looks arcane at first, but trackers can be extremely friendly music interfaces. Just be prepared to look like a total geek once you’ve worked it out, because it’ll look even more arcane to everyone else)
The resulting tool comes with all the modules you’ll need, and it’s completely free to use. There’s even an included sample library.
Now, the next time you’re stuck in an Internet cafe, you can compose a song.
Creator Ruben Ramos says this is the first tracker on the Web, and shares his development process with us:
The sourcecode of the application is the same than the desktop version, it’s C++. I used a research project from Adobe Labs to build my sources for the AVM2 (ActionScript Virtual Machine 2), which is the last virtual machine used in Flash. This way, I got a binary version as a .swf of my original desktop-based application.
I wrote some parts code for this version, but only a few. For example the graphic rendering: in the desktop version was using the graphic card acceleration; for this version I implemented a software renderer.
After it, I added some special features for this version. For example, I implemented a filesystem with remote access to allow the load of resources stored on the server. With this feature songs and samples can be loaded from the webserver, which is good to have a base sample library available on the server.
Try it out for yourself:
http://www.skale.org/