new codebass radio website

The needs of CodeBass Radio have outgrown what the CodeBass project website can accommodate. As of last week, all things pertaining to CodeBass Radio have been separated out onto their own corner of the blogosphere. Check it out at http://codebassradio.net !!  All the new shows are featured there, the nav is streamlined, and the schedule and listen links are laid out a bit more clearly. (If anyone knows of a good WP schedule plugin let me know. The “Weekly Schedule” plugin I’ve tried already, though very nice,  isn’t very friendly with my current layout.) Replays of some shows can be found there in the form of MixClouds.

You can't stop the signal.

My good friend Erika Rich, who has provided all my blog space for like a million years now by the way, helped me out by enhancing the logo a bit to differentiate the two sites a little more clearly until the overall site redesign is complete. As you will see once you hit the new blog, we have our hands a little full at the moment! In addition to all the cool new CBR stuff, I am gearing up to speak on behalf of the MediaSlurp team at various UGs and cf.Objective. In addition to my actual day job, this leaves me pretty bogged down.  ETA on the full redesign is post cf.Objective.

Go. GO NOW!

runtime expectations replays

If you missed the premiere of Runtime Expectations, a new tech talk show happening live on CodeBass Radio every other Monday, you can now catch up via RSS podcast feed:

• Get Runtime Expectations, bundled along with many other community podcasts and screencasts via the MediaSlurp AIR player.
• Get the RSS Podcast Feed here: http://codebassradio.net/audio/shows/runtimeexpectations.xml
• Feedburner: http://feeds.feedburner.com/RuntimeExpectations

Visit the Runtime Expectations page at the new CodeBass Radio website for more info. The guys had a blast doing their first live show which has received lots of great feedback. The podcast, only available for a couple of days, already has an impressive number of subscribers.

cfhour 100th episode live on CodeBass Radio

In case you haven’t heard the most recent CFHour() podcast, the guys have announced their plans to air the 100th show LIVE on CodeBass Radio. I was already jacked up enough to be doing my first MediaSlurp interview on CFHour when Dave punctuated the experience by asking if they could use CodeBass Radio airspace. I am truly excited to be hosting this milestone episode for the CFHour() guys. They’re a definite community staple. I can certainly say on behalf of the MediaSlurp team that we enjoy having CFHour() bundled within the player.

new codebass radio shows

We have added many great new DJs and shows to the CodeBass Radio lineup. Check out the rundown at the new website for the full scoop. Here’s a shortlist. If I wrote enough to reflect my joy, we’d never get out of here..

• Jason Dean started in his new weekly slot with The Guilty Robot Broadcast this past Thursday at 1pm Eastern. He came crashing out of the gate with one of the highest listener counts in CodeBass Radio history.
• Bob Silverberg and Brian Rinaldi will be joining the lineup at 10am Eastern next Friday, April 1, with their new bi-weekly show Vitamin Sweet! NO JOKE. They will be featuring fresh releases from bands both old and new. Check out Bob’s blog post for more information.
• Adam Bertram will be joining the CodeBass Radio Rock Rage lineup starting this Tuesday at 2pm Eastern! Visit the CodeBass Radio Rock Rage page to see who else will be contributing this Tuesday.
• Last but not least, monkehRadio will start running the new #70sWednesday this week and will be simulcasting to CodeBass Radio.

Adrian Pomilio,  Bucky Schwarz, and yours truly will  talk tech with a beer in one hand and a mic in the other.  We’ll be covering all the aspects of software development that compel us to put a beer in that first hand. Runtime Expectations will be broadcast live from the American Tobacco Campus in Durham, NC, as often as the bitter side of development flares up to the point where only alcohol can extinguish the flames.

You can tweet to @RTExpectations during the show to offer commentary, and we’ll respond.. if we like you.  Also, if we’re taking calls during the show that evening, you can skype us at bengfarrell.

CodeBass Radio can be accessed via your favorite player, and you can also access the station via the MediaSlurp AIR player.

If you miss the show, that’s okay, we missed you, too.  Our shows will subsequently be offered in podcast format to be accessed using your favorite podcast software, and of course they will be bundled with the other great community podcasts found in the MediaSlurp AIR application. Visit http://mediaslurp.com to get your free copy!

Adrian Pomilio
Full time geek, focusing on the web and mobile. Husband, father, and all that good stuff…

uiandtherest.com | twitter: @adrianpomilio

Bucky Schwarz
Bucky Schwarz is a software developer currently living in Durham, NC. He loves JavaScript, music, video games and beer.

buckyschwarz.net | twitter: @hoorayimhelping

Ben Farrell
I program UIs and web video during the day, and then play with audio applications at night. Also somewhere in there I try to make games and other applications. My weapons are Flash, Flex….and lately, jQuery

blastanova.com | twitter: @bengfarrell

Follow us @RTExpectations or @CodeBass to find out when the next show will be.

One of the most beautiful things about a community like ours is that while it has an intimate feel, we have the ability to gather good friends and a variety of knowledge from points around the globe. Last year, I had the privilege of performing teaching assistant duties for two different hands-on classes at AdobeMAX. These classes were led by four people: Bob Silverberg from Canada, Mark Mandel from Australia, Andy Allan from Scotland and Matt Gifford from England. Call me a huge dork, but that was a pretty profound experience for me in spite that I’ve traveled aplenty and am married to a UK native.

2 devs from down under

It is with the above in mind that I am excited to bring you a Q&A from the guys behind the brand spankin’ new podcast, 2 Devs From Down Under. They are the aforementioned Mark Mandel, from Australia, and Kai Koenig, from New Zealand. Let’s have at it!

Vicky: There has been a demand for a podcast from Down Under for a long time now. What finally inspired you to take the full plunge into the world of audio?

Kai: It was an idea I personally toyed with for quite awhile. Most of my hesitation to do it probably stemmed from the fact that English is not my first language and that I produce a quite weird-sounding accent (German with an odd flavour of NZ-English). But, luckily, in Mark I found a partner who doesn’t care and who has a quite distinct Aussie accent himself. That made me finally think, “Meh, why bother?” And we got started.

Mark: Honestly, Kai just bullied me into it ;o)  I always enjoy speaking in general, whether it’s one on one, doing interviews on other podcasts, or in front of a crowd. So, when Kai came to me with the idea, it sounded like a lot of fun. Basically, I get to talk to a friend for an hour about technical stuff, and everyone else gets to listen in. Sounds like a good time to me!

2 Devs From Down Under!

Vicky: What format of content can we expect in the average episode? Phone interviews? On-site interviews from conferences? Of what will the technical content consist?  Will it be highly ColdFusion centric? Will it cross platforms?  Will you venture into the realm of open source?

Kai: I think you’re going to get a nice mixture of technical content around Adobe tech. Mark is obviously extremely well known in the worlds of ColdFusion frameworks and Java integration, and I deal a lot with ColdFusion and rich applications built in technologies like Flex, AIR, jQuery and others. So, I guess there’ll be a quite nice coverage of cool things to talk about. Besides that, we attend lot of conferences and get around quite a bit. I can certainly see phone interviews happening, or we might have topic-driven episodes with one or two special guests for the whole time.

Mark: I’d have to agree with Kai. I also would expect that it will be quite diverse at times, as we both have fairly eclectic tastes, and we’re both happy to let the conversation go wherever it interests us.  We’ve not really sat down and written a ‘charter’ or anything for the podcast. We’ve kept it fairly free-form, which I think will also drive its appeal.

Kai: Adobe backend and client technologies. Not solely CF, though it’ll certainly be a cornerstone. Both of us build and use open source tools a lot, but I don’t see our podcast becoming focused on PHP any time soon (not that I have anything against PHP in particular, though :)

Mark: I can see me (obviously) talking a lot about ColdFusion, Java, and my open source projects. But, it could be quite wide from there. In our first podcast we talked about DVCS, Continuous Integration, and issues between the Java Community and Oracle. I think it’s really going to be a case of seeing what is coming across our table that week or so, and what comes up in the conversation.

Vicky: At what conferences this year are you scheduled to speak thus far? Will you tie your presentation topics and your podcasts together?

Kai:
webDU 2011 (Sydney, AU)
d2wc 2011 (Kansas City, USA)
cf.Objective(ANZ) 2011 (Melbourne, AU)

Mark:
cf.Objective() 2011  (Minneapolis, USA)
cf.Objective(ANZ) 2011  (Melbourne, AU)

As per tying the podcast and presentations together – don’t know – guess we’ll just have to wait and see!

There you have it! How can you tune in to this brilliant new bit of audio action?? The 2 Devs From Down Under website provides the ability to subscribe using iTunes, Google, and just about any other player you desire. The 2 Devs From Down Under podcast is also now bundled with the MediaSlurp desktop player.

Be sure to follow 2 Devs From Down Under @2dduPodcast on Twitter. Follow Mark @neurotic and find Kai @agentK.

2 Devs Trapped In MediaSlurp Like The Bad Guys in Superman II

bob silverberg to host bob’s basement

CodeBass Radio will feature a new show hosted by the legend himself, Bob Silverberg! Bob is not only a good friend but an absolute ColdFusion community rock star. One of his most recent and notable efforts has been serving as Content Chair for this year’s cf.Objective() conference and leading its Content Advisory Board. Chances are, you’ve encountered Bob in your travels.. either watching him speak or sitting in on one of his hands-on classes. If you use ValidateThis or have sought valuable assistance with anything from OO to ORM, you know Bob. Now get to know him on a more personal level by tuning into Bob’s Basement this Monday at 1pm Eastern. Bob has written a very compelling blog post about his new show with which he seeks to bring you Monday afternoon enjoyment in the form of music and whatever other mayhem goes on in his basement. Set your dial to CodeBass Radio and get ready for the fun!

NCDevCon 2010

codebass radio tech talk

This is somewhat premature of an announcement only because the details are still being ironed out, but they’ve been noodling it for awhile so I can’t make myself sit on it any longer now that it’s confirmed. I’m thrilled to say that Ben Farrell, along with Adrian Pomilio and Bucky Schwarz, has decided to plunge into the world of on-air tech talk.  They will be broadcasting live from North Carolina which already points to endless possibilities in terms of on-site guests. Furthermore, North Carolina is the home of NCDevCon and some of the best user groups around. With the way those NC cats can throw together a top notch conference like nobody’s business, there’s no way a show from there could suck. We’ll get back to you with more details on time and content, but suffice it to say Ben’s procured a quality microphone for the effort. Look out!

CodeBass Radio Tech Talk!

I’m happy to say that they got a pretty decent demo set up, it’s quite impressive, and worthy of Cher herself! Michael Robert Jugan was kind enough to give us a demo and provide us with a write-up of his efforts. Thanks Michael!

The Making of the Flash Auto-tuner:
by Michael Robert Jugan
Demo: http://slothtoss.com/projects/flash_auto-tuner/
Source: http://code.google.com/p/flash-autotuner/

Last summer I completed a signals and systems class, and read a blog post about MicDroid. MicDroid is an open source auto-tuning application for Android phones. This reminded me of the iPhone application “I Am T-Pain”. Unfortunately, I did not have a smartphone to try either of these. Not wanting to live without an auto-tuning program, I googled “Flash auto-tuner”.

I was surprised to find that no one had made an auto-tuner in Flash. After a little more research, I understood why. One of the most helpful resources I found was Ben’s blog post Do you Belieeeeeve in Flash Autotuning. This was the first page I found specifically about creating a Flash auto-tuner. After emailing Ben, it was clear there were a couple of limitations to making an auto-tuner with Flash.

First of all, Ben explained to me that until recently you could not directly access the microphone’s data. Previously, you could only record from a microphone using a server. Secondly, I learned that the true Auto-Tune is a proprietary audio effect by Antares Audio Technologies. Fortunately, others have been able to reproduce the effect.

The recently released Flash version 10.1 gave developers access to the microphone’s data. With the ability to access microphone’s samples, there was just one more obstacle to creating a Flash auto-tuner. Unsurprisingly, this was programming an auto-tuner.

I had Fourier transforms fresh in my mind, but I didn’t know enough about audio manipulation to program an auto-tuner. I decided to read over the MicDroid documentation and source. I found that MicDroid is a port of Autotalent. Autotalent is an open source auto-tuner written by Tom Baran.

Autotalent is a LADSPA audio plugin written in C. MicDroid’s source code kept the core logic of Autotalent, but removed the LADSPA interface. Fortunately, Ben had also mentioned to me the Adobe Alchemy project. This is a research project which allows C and C++ code to be run in Flash projects.

Using Alchemy and MicDroid seemed like the next obvious step to making a Flash auto-tuner. The most difficult part of the process was getting Alchemy installed. I used Cygwin to run linux under windows so that I could quickly compile with Alchemy, and publish in the Flash IDE. After a lot of trial and error, I finally got the Alchemy sample programs to compile and run.

Modifying MicDroid’s code was straightforward. I kept the basic functionality, and removed the code relating to Android phones. In its place, I created various functions to be called by the Flash program. The file “flash_autotuner.c” contains all of these functions which link Flash to the C auto-tuner. The Flash program sends groups of 2048 floats (representing sound) to be auto-tuned. The float data is quickly shared between Flash and C using the technique: Memory allocation in C with direct access in Actionscript. This method gives Flash access to an array in the C program.

The final task was to get input data in Flash. This was simply Actionscript 3 programming. Existing libraries were used to import sound data from .mp3 and .wav files. Alternatively, the sound data can be obtained in real-time, or in recordings. In all cases, the special C array is filled with floats of sound data. A function is then called to pass it through the auto-tuner.

The Flash Auto-tuner does its job fairly well. A sound similar to the famous “T-Pain effect” can be obtained after tweaking the settings. However, I believe a better Flash application can be made if the goal is to simply mimic the “T-Pain effect”. Interestingly, “I Am T-Pain” can tune in real-time on an iPhone. MicDroid is unable to run in real-time due to latency issues. Additionally, the Flash auto-tuner is very CPU intensive in real-time. I believe the “T-Pain effect” is slightly different than true auto-tuning (it seems to have more of an echo). Auto-tuning may be accomplished on the iPhone using a less sophisticated algorithm than Autotalent. Regardless, I hope the Flash Auto-tuner will increase the accessibility of sounding like T-Pain.

It coincides with a CD that Mike and his lovely Co-Opera partner, Alexandra Bwye, who I had the pleasure of meeting at Adobe MAX, released  back in September. Dismal-land can be found on  iTunes Mexico, Rhapsody, Zune, Amazon MP3, Thumbplay, Napster, iTunes U.S., iTunes Australia/N.Z., iTunes Canada, iTunes UK/European Union, and iTunes Japan.  You listen to and purchase the CD at the Co-Opera page on Bandcamp. There is also a list of the Co-Opera discography, among other things. Check it out!

Mike’s music can be found, along with all of the other awesome community contributed music, in the #CodeBassRadio rotation which now runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! Hear awesome tunes by your friends in among other cool music. (On many occasions, I’ve looked up to see what kick ass song is playing, and it turns out to be one by one of my own friends. There are some seriously talented people among us!)

mediaslurp

Since my very first “What Is CodeBass” post, I’ve dreamt of a collaboration along the lines of MediaSlurp.  TJ Downes, a good friend of mine for several years now, decided he wanted to create a desktop player built on AIR. He took notice of the love and care I’ve been putting into CodeBass all year, he saw Ben Farrell’s Flash player, he put together something viable, and he asked us to partner up.  In *three weeks*, we’ve managed the enterprise-scale rollout of a killer community application. It’s been like a perfectly put together puzzle of which I’m ever so grateful to be a piece.

MediaSlurp

MediaSlurp aims to bring you all the community radio streams and podcasts in one convenient place, making it easier for you to keep up with your friends and your favorite technologies. We realize v1 was not all-inclusive.. So, if you have or know about a stream that isn’t in there, we encourage you to visit the MediaSlurp website and fill out the provider form.  To commemorate the release of version 1.0, we’re having a contest. I’ll tell you more about that in a minute. In the meantime, fire up MediaSlurp to catch up on great shows such as CFHour(), RIA Radio, The Flex Show, and RIA Podcast.

jason levine’s “music to design by”

The Illustrious Jason Levine has collaborated with a very talented Mr. Fred Fung to create a collection of inspiring tunes called.. you guessed it.. Music To Design By. It is now available on iTunes, Amazon, and CDBaby. Stealing Jason’s own words…

This album contains 18 songs, each of which have several different movements (different melodies, metric modulations, key modulations, feel changes) and each piece effectively ‘fades’ into the next, creating a seamless string of melodic and rhythmic content without ever stopping.

Music To Design By

If you’ve been paying attention, by now you know that I am a great admirer of Jason and his music. There is just no way I can compete with his ability to explain this compilation. What I will do is point you to Jason’s blog for more information and tell you that getting to know Jason and his music has been one of the many great benefits to starting up CodeBass this year. I can’t think of any other reason I’d have been over on Wikipedia looking up “claves”. Fans of photography definitely should jump over to Jason’s blog where there are many gorgeous photos and tons of educational material.

In honor of this release, #CodeBassRadio will be hosting The Jason Levine hour at 8pm Eastern / 5pm Pacific today and then again, tomorrow, 12/22, at the same time. This show will be comprised of a variety of Mr. Levine’s music and tunes by artists he’s named as big influences.

monkehradio goes 24/7

By now, you know monkehRadio. Home of #80sFriday, #80sRewind, and The Matt Gifford Show, monkehRadio was the first stream of its kind to hit the community airwaves.

monkehRadio

It was the inspiration for #CodeBassRadio, and without the help of those guys I’d have never gotten #CodeBassRadio off the ground. In fact, the only reason #CBR went 24/7 sooner than later was to provide a stream over which the MediaSlurp team had full manual control to code against. monkehRadio still provides the best and most listened-to shows. Matthew Tholey and Tim Cunningham are among the cool new DJs joining the monkehRadio team. Matt G. has a lot more planned for 2011, so stay tuned. You can, of course, listen to monkehRadio via MediaSlurp.

There’s been a playlist on #CodeBassRadio this evening, compliments of Matthew Tholey, and this will be replayed again tomorrow at 9pm Eastern / 6pm Pacific.

swag contest

And finally, on to the contest! The MediaSlurp team wanted to make the release of version 1 special. After some discussion, and inspired by the contests Matt’s been running over on the RIAdvent calendar, we’ve decided to throw together a Grab Bag of Swag! All you have to do is Tweet:

“I want some killer swag to commemorate #MediaSlurp v1.0! http://bit.ly/geFbWc – w00t!”

One entry per person & winner determined Monday 12/27. Winner gets to choose FIVE items from the following list:

ria radio – in the words of stacey mulcahy

A few years back, just as Catalyst was being released to the public, a few of us had been brought together through recommendation to do a series for O’Reilly InsideRIA called The Summer of Catalyst. Originally it started with Garth Braithwaite, but soon Leif Wells, Zach Stepek and myself were recommended and joined in. It was supposed to be a series of articles about Catalyst – our thoughts, opinions, tutorials, etc. But, this format didn’t last too long. We ended up moving towards podcasting – attempting to get together once a week and soon we found ourselves talking about much more than just Catalyst. We changed the name to RIA Radio, Garth did some really fun branding around – and a new podcast was born.

RIA Radio!

So why podcast? Well, it seemed the best format for our endeavor, because we really just wanted to be having a true conversation – with some topics, but were definitely more interested in the tangents and following those to their unlikely end. Its hard, sometimes, to get a true sense of personality through a blog post, but in a podcast it’s hard to mistake tone and inflection. Mostly, we just really enjoy talking nerd, and sometimes, not nerd, with each other and often these conversations would last much longer than expected – adding a bunch of editing time onto Garth’s plate.

We made an effort as a team, to attend the conferences that we could and interviewing people there – we’ve made it to conferences like FlashBelt, Flash in the City, 360|Flex and of course Adobe Max. Doing the podcast on site is a lot of fun, the area becomes a bit of a community area where people come to hang out and you get to meet way more people than you would have otherwise.

Kevin Lynch on RIA Radio at AdobeMAX

RIARadio soon changed format a bit – we went from talking with just each other to having guests. We’ve had quite a variety of people on RIARadio – from the Influxis crew, Steven Sacks, Big Spaceship, Keith Peters, Joshua Davis and Branden Hall,Simeon Bateman to Mark Anders and even Kevin Lynch. I think i can say comfortably for the RIARadio team, that having Kevin Lynch on the podcast was definitely a highlight.

Admittedly, Garth Braithwaite does 75% of the work behind RIARadio – from designing little logos, to organizing guests and to editing the actual podcast. I like to think I am there for entertainment value – I’m pretty sure he has to edit half of what I say just to make it sure it doesn’t have an explicit content rating. So, thanks to Garth, for making this happen and allowing us to get together and do what we do best – talk shit.

A couple of summers ago, I took keyboard lessons to see if I could brush up on my skills. My main goal was to become decent at improvisation. I just couldn’t do it. I took piano lessons from kindergarten through seventh grade, years spent looking at notes written on staffs. Then I joined a rock band. I wrote some parts for myself, but it was really just guesswork—pressing some keys and seeing if what came out sounded good.

To learn to improvise, you have to get into music theory. In a previous article (http://codebass.net/2010/09/14/flash-and-a-little-music-theory) I talked a little bit about music theory, describing how notes related to each other in terms of their frequencies. This time around, I’m getting into the heart of it, how notes relate to each other and form key signatures and chords. I’m going to use this knowledge to put together a improvisational helper designed to sit next to you as you play the piano. It will tell you what notes to play for a given key or chord. I will include a web demo at the end of this post, but I’ll also describe how I used the same code library to publish an Android application.

Keys and Chords and Memorization

Music theory requires a lot of memorization to put it into practice. There’s plenty of rhyme and reason behind the keys that go together to make a chord, but honestly, when you’re playing, you just don’t have the time to slowly calculate what notes go together—you have to just know it (but only because you practice your scales and chords every day).

Luckily, since this is a blog post and not a recital, we have a little time to figure out how these things work. Let’s talk key signatures! When you look at a piano keyboard you see the following keys:

If I go from a C to a C#/Db, that’s called a half step. Going from a C to a D is a whole step. It’s all just terminology for the distance between notes. If you move from the left to the right by one key, that’s half. By two keys, whole. Occasionally, you won’t pass over a black key when moving up by a key, like an E to an F, but it’s still only a half step.

This is important when talking about key signatures. If you were to play Happy Birthday, you might play it in the key of C Major. You can play it in any key, but only major ones. If you were to switch to minor, it would have a sad connotation. The key of C Major is a good example for illustration, because it just so happens to have all white keys. If you were to change it to C Minor, you’d change the E to an Eb, the A to an Ab, and the B to a Bb.

How do we know this? Well, here are the rules:

To get all the notes in a major key, start at the root (C is the root for C Major) and go up like so to get all the keys in the key signature: whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step.

For a minor key on the other hand, start at the root, and go up: whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step.

That’s easy enough to do in Flash; just start with an array of all the notes beginning at the root (in this case A): ["A", "A#", "B", "C", "C#", "D", "D#", "E", "F", "F#", "G", "G#"] . . .

. . . and pick out what you need:
if (major) {
notesInKey.push( notesToIndex[0] );
notesInKey.push( notesToIndex[2] );
notesInKey.push( notesToIndex[4] );
notesInKey.push( notesToIndex[5] );
notesInKey.push( notesToIndex[7] );
notesInKey.push( notesToIndex[9] );
notesInKey.push( notesToIndex[11] );
} else {
notesInKey.push( notesToIndex[0] );
notesInKey.push( notesToIndex[2] );
notesInKey.push( notesToIndex[3] );
notesInKey.push( notesToIndex[5] );
notesInKey.push( notesToIndex[7] );
notesInKey.push( notesToIndex[8] );
notesInKey.push( notesToIndex[10] );
}

Now, onto chords! The simplest chord is a triad. The triad is really what everyone means when they tell you a chord but aren’t any more specific than the root and whether it’s major or minor. A C chord is a triad. A C minor is a triad. In the triad there are three notes. They are all in the key signature, and are the 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes.

When we used the notesInKey variable earlier, we could get a triad chord by grabbing notesInKey[0], notesInKey[2], and notesInKey[4].

That’s pretty easy right? A C Major would be comprised of C, E, and G, whereas the minor would be C, Eb, and G.

The 7th would be a little more complicated. There are a few variations on it: the 7th (7), the major 7th (maj7), and the minor 7th (m7). The 7th is a major triad with the 7th note in a minor key signature on top. The major 7th is a major triad with the 7th note in the major key signature on top. The minor 7th is the same thing, but all keys are in the minor key signature.

9ths and 6ths are less commonly used but similar, so I won’t get into them here.

You can augment, sustain, or diminish a chord. To augment a chord, simply take the triad but raise the that last note (the 5th in the key signature) up one half step.  For example, a C augmented chord would be C, E, and G# instead of C, E, and G. To sustain something, you are typically raising the second note in the triad (the 3rd) up one half step.  So your C sustained chord would be C, F, and G. There are other sustains, and I won’t get into diminished here.  Moving on!

Making a Mobile Application

What can this knowledge get you? Well, you can put a UI on it and make it easy for folks to see exactly what keys are in a key signature. It can be a handy reference for when they’re playing piano or keyboard. But what good would it be on a web page? Let’s target mobile applications so you can put your phone or tablet right where the sheet music usually goes.

At the same time, though, I wanted to show you guys what the application looks like on the Web, so I need two applications, but I really don’t want to do the app twice over.  What do I do?

From here, you can add a project.  I added my Improvisation Library project. Alternately, you can just publish out a SWC from your library project and add the SWC to your new project using the “Add SWC Folder” or “Add SWC.”

So that’s how we can make a web app. If you have the new Flash Builder Burrito beta from labs.adobe.com, you can now create an Android application project as well. An Android project is a wee bit different than a normal Flex project. We need to use the Mobile Application tag, set the first view state, and add our application into that view state.

<s:MobileApplication xmlns:fx=”http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009″
xmlns:s=”library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark”
firstView=”views.ImproAndroidHome” xmlns:views=”views.*”>
</s:MobileApplication>

My first view looks like this:

<s:View xmlns:fx=”http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009″
xmlns:s=”library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark”
xmlns:views=”views.*”
actionBarVisible=”false”>
<views:ImproMain width=”100%” height=”100%” />
</s:View>

Compare this to our normal, everyday, Flex web app version:

<s:Application xmlns:fx=”http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009″
xmlns:s=”library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark”
xmlns:mx=”library://ns.adobe.com/flex/mx”
xmlns:views=”views.*”
width=”900″ height=”600″
backgroundColor=”0×000000″>
<fx:Style source=”WebStyle.css” />

<views:ImproMain width=”100%” height=”100%” />
</s:Application>

There are a couple things to note. The first is that I shut off the actionBar and made it invisible in my Android project. I did this because the action bar is specific to a mobile application . . . it can’t be used in my web application.  It’s just a bar that sits on the top of the mobile app and primarily serves as a title and/or toolbar for the app. So for the purposes of keeping these things consistent, I went action bar-less.

I also used a new CSS file for my web app. It appears that, although my default text color is white on Android, it’s black on a web app. So I created a CSS file for my web app only to clear up that inconsistency.

That’s it!  Maybe next I’ll conquer the forthcoming Blackberry tablet, but that’s another day. To check out the finished application go to

http://blastanova.com/labs/impro/Impro.html

This latest music-theory functionality is built into my open source, live instrumentation project. You can view that here:

http://code.google.com/p/flashamaphone

Lastly, you can grab the Library project, the web app, and the Android app source code all here:
http://blastanova.com/labs/impro/ImproProjects.zip

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