DigiMix

Thanks to everyone who tried out the Alpha Preview. Now we are taking Digimix to the next level.

We’ll post news here when the next version is available.

Here’s a quick video that demonstrates some of the features we have working thus far. Enjoy!

This is a fast paced time lapse video of a mix being created.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ogZ-Ze02As 

This is the same video but at normal speed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUVkZS7_bcY

Some of the things we are working on now that should be up in the next week.

* Pan Automation: We just launched volume automation, and pan is next. You’ll be able to automate pan changes over time on individual track clips.

* Track Clip Editing: We have a lot of cool features for editing track clips now (see this post), but moving clips around, copy/paste, etc, is very weak right now, so we’ll be focusing in on that for a bit.

* Undo/Redo: This is way overdue as you can’t recover from an action that you didn’t mean to do. The good news is that all the user actions follow a “command pattern” in the code, and all of them have undo/redo functions ready to be implemented.

* Zoom: Right now you can’t zoom the view horizontally. It’s in there, we just havn’t exposed it yet, so it will most likely work by resizing the “viewport“.

The latest version of the alpha now has volume automation on track clips. This means that you can do fade-ins and fade-outs on individual clips. In fact you can automate the clip volume over time in any way you see fit. The track volume affects the overall volume for all clips on a track, but the clip volume automation allows you to adjust volume per clip.

You can add control points simply by clicking on the line. Once you add a point, it’s immediately draggable.

To edit an existing point, just click and drag it.

To remove a point, hold down the shift key while clicking the point, and it will be deleted.

To clear the automation, right click on the clip and select “Clear Volume Automation”.

The control points positions will update properly with each “trim” action. (See previous post on trim, push, slide, reverse, stretch).

The automation data is saved with your project and is reconstructed when you open your project again.

One of the things we are working on right now is the ability to automate volume and pan fades across track clips.

Currently you can set the global volume and pan for a track, but with this addition you’ll be able fine tune these for individual clips. It will let you do volume fade-in and fade-out, or “ducking” audio when you want just a piece to be quieter than the rest. With the pan automation you’ll be able to have a clip pan from left to right as it plays.

It works by setting control points on the clip, and the parameter will be interpolated overtime between the points. We are actually building this so that it’s generic enough that we can extend it to automating effect parameters as well. Should be up and running in the alpha in a few days. Good Times.

We’ve been testing the Digimix Alpha Preview on various browsers and operating systems to make sure everything works as expected.

Today we finally took the plunge and tried it on Firefox3 Beta and WOW, what a difference!

FF3 is so much faster at rendering html than FF2, and lucky for us it runs Flash content even faster now too. Animation and screen refresh is noticeably faster and running Flash in FullScreen mode is much faster now too. Good times.

Just added a new effect today. It’s actually called “SweepPeak”.

It’s different from a standard “wah” effect in that it sweeps a peaking filter through a range of frequencies, whereas a proper wahwah will use an envelope follower.

The original idea behind this effect was to create a more subtle sound - the ethereal autowah type effect. You can raise and lower the Q and switch the gain from positive to negative - (which is switching between a peaking filter and a notch filter configuration).

The effects that you can create entirely depend on what kind of source material you start with. It sounds really good on guitar clips!

For several months, we’ve been toying with this idea of creating an audio editor/mixing application that’s accessible on the web, right in your browser. We started out by creating a desktop version of Digimix and even won an award for it last year.

http://www.adobe.com/newsletters/edge/september2007/articles/article1/
Since then, we formed the company, Digimix Inc, and have been busy creating a new online version with a ton of new features. With the upcoming release of Flash Player 10, we’ll have the best of both worlds, offering both a browser based version and a desktop version of Digimix.

The alpha preview is just that… a preview of where we are going. Not all features are in, and the ones that are there have bugs. But we want you to try it out, and let us know what you think about where we are headed with Digimix. We’ll be updating almost daily, so check back often and send feedback!

http://www.digimix.com/alpha

Once you’ve created a project, added some clips, and finished your masterpiece, what do you do next?

Bounce it down and take it with you! From the project menu, choose “Bounce Down”. This will create a final mix resulting in a 16bit, 44.1khz, Stereo WAV file.

Once your mix is created, you can preview it and even download it to your hard drive. The ability to download your mix requires that you have Flash Player 10 (beta) installed.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/
This is one of the coolest new features of Flash Player 10 (beta), and one reason we decided to release this alpha before we are anywhere close to a 1.0 release, was to test this feature out and get feedback. In fact we think that the ability to open and save files (even audio) to and from your hard drive, all from a browser app is a “game changing” moment in rich internet application development.

We are taking advantage of this new feature to load, edit, process, mix, and download audio. All in the browser, with no server side processing whatsoever. Thanks Adobe!

Using the project menu, you can open/save projects from/to your hard drive. Digimix project files have the extension .dmx and contain all the data about your project including tracks, clips, positions, effects, etc.

The ability to do this directly in the browser is a completely new feature of the Flash Player. In fact it will only work if you have the Flash Player 10 beta installed. You can get it here:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/

You can still use Digimix with Flash Player 9, but the ability to open, save, and download mixes will be disabled.

One thing to note here: There is currently a bug in Flash Player 10 where if you replace an existing file when saving, it will leave the file empty. So for now, each time you save, you have to save the file with a different name. We decided to add a date/time stamp to the file name for you, so each time you save you won’t have to manually type in a different name.

This also applies to downloading mixes after doing a “Bounce down”. This problem will go away once Flash Player 10 is officially released.

With that said, you can create a project, save it, close the browser, come back later and re-open the project to continue working on it.