DigiMix

Sorry this blog has been so quite for the past few months, but we were recently acquired by Aviary.com and everything has moved over to their infrastructure.
Here’s the scoop:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/09/aviary-acquires-browser-based-audio-editor-digimix/

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 buy generic cialis buy generic viagra order cialis buy viagra purchase viagra order cialis buy levitra order cialis professional order cialis buy viagra 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.

You can always use the playback controls at the bottom to rewind, fast-forward, etc but you can also simply click anywhere on the time ruler and the playhead will move to your mouse positions. Also note that the playhead’s position updates in the clip overview above the ruler to indicate where the playhead is in relation to the entire mix.

You can also drag the playhead across the time ruler while playing back to acheive a pseudo scrubbing effect. Try this with “snap-to-grid” on and off.

Also, when the player is stopped, you can double click anywhere on the time-ruler and playback will start from you mouse position.

In the alpha, we’ve included a small library of clips from remix.nin.com to test with, but in the future you’ll be able to upload your own clips and we hope to offer a wide variety of loops, effects, music beds, etc for you to play with.

All the clips available can have metadata that describes the clip’s tempo, key, duration, author, copyright etc. Here we are specifically talking about tempo and using clips of various tempos in the same mix.

Let’s say you create a project at 140bpm and you see that all the available clips are labeled as 128bpm. With the match tempo feature, you can drag a clip into the editor and it will automatically be stretched to match the tempo of your project. This way you can use clips at varying tempos and include them all in your mix together. You can turn this on or off by selecting the “Match Tempo” checkbox in the library.

Editing track clips is at the heart of any audio editor. It’s the weakest part of our alpha release so far. You can’t copy, paste, split, join, or drag multiple clips yet, and it’s really hard to accomplish tasks that all the other editors make simple.

However, it’s all on it’s way, but for now we wanted to point out what “is” there. There are some cool features in there now that all have to do with how you trim a track clip.

Trim: The simplest of course, but this allows you to modify the start/end point of your clip. Just mouse-over the right or left edge of a clip, and you’ll see a hilite. Click and drag to the left or right and the clip will be trimmed as you expect.

Loop: Audio clips that are dragged into the editor have metadata about them that indicate the clip’s tempo, beats, key, etc. If the metadata indicates that the clip is “Loopable”, then the trim process allows you to endlessly expand the clip. Currently in the alpha all the available clips are “Loopable”. You’ll see a vertical white line on the clip where the loop starts over. All the clip trim modes listed here support “Loopable” clips.

Push: This mode keeps one side of the clip constant, while modifying the other. To try this out, hold down the control-key on pc, command-key on mac, while trimming a clip. What you’ll notice is that that the end of the clip you are dragging remains as you had it while the other side is trimmed.

Slide: What this does, is to keep the track start/end positions locked, and allows you to drag the audio inside the clip. To try this out, hold down the control-key on pc, command-key on mac while dragging the center of a clip. It’s cool because let’s say you’ve spent some time trimming a vocal clip down, and you’ve got the position on the track just right, then you notice that you didn’t quite trim it properly. You can easily fix it by using the Slide feature.

Reverse: Pretty straight forward, or backwards rather. Right-click a track clip and choose “Reverse Clip”. It will do what you expect. Also note that the effects on a clip will be re-processed, so we are not just reversing the clip as is.

Stretch: This will lengthen or shorten a clip over time without affecting it’s pitch. As with most pitch-shifting algorithms, there is a limit to how far you can stretch before the quality really starts to degrade. But if you stretch a clip within 10-20% of it’s original value, it sounds pretty good. To try this out, hold down the control-key AND the shift-key at the same time and drag the end of a clip. For mac users, hold down the command-key AND the shift-key. The clip will be re-processed. Note that each clip maintains a reference to it’s original unprocessed audio, and performs the time-stretching on the original, so that we don’t stretch an already stretched clip!

Since we are in alpha, the usability is still pretty lame and you might miss the effects altogether. But they are alot of fun so be sure and try them out. You can get to the effects window by simply double-clicking a track clip, or selecting “Effects” from the right-click menu over a track clip. What you see now is our designer’s nightmare since it’s still programmer art, however you can play with the basic knobs for now to try them out. We’ll add some cool face plates so they look like real effect devices later

We chose to have an effects chain per track clip rather than on the entire track as a whole. Obviously that decision was for performance reasons, but it turns out to be quite useful since you can have clips of various instruments/music on a single track, so why not allow different effects on those clips as well.

You get a 5 second preview area for trying out various effects and settings. Once you like what you hear in preview mode, you can “apply” the effects to the entire clip and continue editing.

We’ll be adding more effects over time, and each effect with have multiple presets.

We chose to do something a little different when it comes to scrolling the view horizontally. Instead of just including a standard scrollbar, we decided to try and give a little more context by including an overview of all the track clips, and indicating what is on screen by drawing a “viewport” on the overview. Think of this as a standard horizontal scrollbar where the viewport is essentially the scroll thumb. Just click and drag it to scroll the tracks view.

The track clips that are currently visible are within the black outline we call the “viewport”.

Here, we have scrolled to the right by clicking and dragging the “viewport”.

You can switch between time and bars/beats display in the app by clicking the “Time” icon next to the ruler, or by clicking the time/music icon in the time display area at the bottom. This will toggle the ruler to show time in seconds or time in bars/beats. It also affects the “snap-to-grid” feature.

Time Ruler

Time Display

Bars/Beats Ruler

Bars/Beats Display