Synthesizer

Any interest in this: bassmoi.com/c2synthbeta

Its a work in progress of course - I am hoping to have a step sequencer and song mode soon, in order to make it into a fun online tool to make retro chip style sound effects and music for games.

What do people think?

Well you definitely have my curiosity, as someone who's been using C2 for a while, HTML5's sound capabilities have always been something of an issue, but this seems really advanced for HTML5, unless I'm missing something really simple you've done to achieve this. Only real criticism is that the interface is very dull, but I'm sure you'll slap a sweet GUI over it and have an awesome synth app :)

Nice!

How does it work? Do you actually generate sounds, or it's some kind of distortion from a base sample?

The knob are really hard to control though

How did you do this? Can't quite work it out, lots of small samples simulating a synth instead of actually generating the sounds?

The synth sounds are generated in script - I cannot take full credit for this, its been done before. But its a fun trick.

What happens is that there are no samples at all at the beginning. When you click a key, we notice that there is no sample, and a sample is generated in javascript (as an audio object) then played, and stored in a hashmap/dictionary. When you press the same key again, we retrieve the already generated audio tag for that exact note and synth setting.

So if you go mad and play a lot of notes, you use up more memory! A small price to pay for bleepy goodness.

The audio is generated in javascript by creating in memory a WAV file, then base64 encoding it, and creating a new audio object then setting the source of that object to the base64 encoded wav file.

The future:

Once I have got the sequencer bit working, I will make it so the sounds and tunes you have made can easily be downloaded, saved or shared.

I love old CHIP / SID music, so hope it will encourage people to make some using this tool for their games and whatnot :-)

Woa crazy stuff!

Now it would be better with a UI that works (I can get a knob to rotate after like 10 attempts...)

Also how about mapping the notes to the keyboard (with azerty/qwerty support)

yeah duly noted!

I must defend the knobs, they work jolly well on mobile as well! But they are a little unusual.

Click on the knob, drag mouse off the knob, and presto! the knob points towards the mouse. If you drag around, it will follow.

if you think they do just suck then I am very open to another possible way of controlling them..? drag up and down is tricky because there may not be enough screen space above.....

I will try to get the keyboard on the go but this keycode business is giving me the hump.....

Click on the knob, drag mouse off the knob, and presto! the knob points towards the mouse. If you drag around, it will follow.

Oh okay, got it now!

I was mostly trying to rotate them with the mouse still over the knob...

See the suggestion I just posted on your knob thread

New version, with sequencer work.

Its very primitive, but you can see how it needs to come along.

Pressing play button plays the sequence in a loop. As it is playing, you can play some notes on keyboard. They will be played in the loop.

You can use keyboard to play notes now as well, though the layout is hard! (It is hard to simulate a keyboard on a keyboard, if you see what I mean).

bassmoi.com/c2synthbeta

I saw this a few days ago, and while it was a neat concept, I had a heck of a time getting anything to work right. Now, it's fantastic! I never really understood what a sythesizer *did*, but now I totally do! Awesome job!

Yeah keep on developing this,

it may become quite great if you make the real thing till the end

(btw the keys still have no effect for me)

love the idea, can we the capx?

What a rad concept....I was thinking of making a drum app, but obviously with samples. But generated samples within the program is awesome! I have a question, how's the timing on the step sequencer, I mean with the delta time and all?

Right all, sorry a little time away.

I have put in pattern looping, and everything works pretty nicely.

It needs global load and save - I may get round to these if any demand.

Also I had to resort to using a plugin in the end, in order to get values from js back into construct 2 without really bad hacking.

I want to follow other directions on related audio projects at the moment so I have opened it all up by putting the whole source on the lovely github.

If anyone would like to do some better graphics I would be much obliged - there only needs to be a knob, piano button, tab, etc - about 6 assets total.

I dont think there is more that can be done with TML5 audio than this until the WebAudio stuff by google really kicks off properly on all browsers.

So, github.com/mrchay/c2synth for the whole project (put the plugin into your plugins directory as you will be accustomed, i have modified it a little I think to give more robustness, nothing major)

I forget who did the javascript plugin - but thankyou very much.

The working latest is at bassmoi.com/c2synthbeta for now

All best!

Hi there,

i came across this in my search and interest in using C2 apps to transmit midi information from mobile to external devices, however the URL is gone. Has this moved to somewhere else?