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Looper's Delight
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Kim Flint wrote: > > I don't think you need the Headspace authoring tools to get it to loop do > you? I think that's a command in the html and the Beatnik plug-in loops >the > sound. So you just put a .wav in there and tell people to use Beatnik to > listen to it. I don't know about groovoids and the rest, but from the >user > point of view the plugin works cross platform and is quite peachy IMHO. My mileage varies. I find Beatnik Plug-in v1.1.7 for the PC to be very unfriendly; the Mac version may not have these problems. First, unless you're very careful, it installs itself as the default viewer for RMF, MIDI, WAV, AIFF, au, SDII, and MOD files. Well, it just flat won't read MOD files (let alone IT, S3M, or XM files). :-( And the General MIDI implementation sucks (it doesn't honor the pan and modulation controllers, among other things). :-( Second (and this is the part that really matters), when you click on a link to one of these file types, Beatnik makes Netscape open a new, blank page with the Beatnik control panel, instead of opening a new, small window like Netscape's LiveAudio does. So much for listening while reading! :-( This can be averted by EMBEDding the audio file. But that means either downloading all the audio files on a page, whether the audience wants to or not, or a separate page for each profile/sound file. It can also be averted by instructing the audience to open a new browser window, using one for Beatnik and one for reading the page, but I think this would lose most of the audience (have I lost you yet?). For a better feel for how maddening this Beatnik behavior is, check out http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/6996/ using Beatnik to play the MIDI files. (They're small canons, intended to be heard while browsing the tiled graphics-- a sort of visual looping?) Third, it cannot handle RealAudio files, so we'd be forced to use much larger WAV, AU or AIFF files-- so much for streaming, and so much for most of the audience. :-( Fourth, while Beatnik does Windows and Mac (but only with Netscape 3.0 or higher in both instances), it's not available for any other platform, while RealAudio is available for more than a dozen. > also, it seems to me the point of an audio sample page on the Looper site > would be for people to get a quick idea of what other people are doing >while > browsing profiles. For that, streaming audio would be the way to go. If >you > want to distribute high quality versions of your music over the internet, > you could just have people get that directly from your site. I totally agree. Surprised? ;-) For me, continuous playback looping would be kinda pointless, since my loops are always part of a larger musical context ("It's your playing, only more of it." --dt, _GP_ 9/96). John Troubador Tech (http://people.delphi.com/johnpollock/