One of the most interesting projects I have worked on recently has just been launched!
It’s called Bandcamp, and is the brain child of Ethan Diamond and Shawn Grunberger, both from Oddpost (which you’ll know these days as Yahoo! Mail).
In short, Bandcamp is a “free hosted publishing platform for musicians”, although there is much more to it than that, including…
- Design customisations and clean, SEO and user friendly URLs for every band
- Automatic transcoding of uploaded tracks to a variety of formats (including lossless)
- The option to give away tracks for free, or to sell them (at either a fixed price or one nominated by the fan who’s buying it, they call it “Name your price”)
- A stats page in the band’s CMS, which shows all complete and partial track listens, incoming links and the general state of the band’s internet rep’, whether it be blog mentions, reviews or who’s embedding their Bandcamp player and where.
- Cool music visualisations as part of their player (more on that in a moment)
My job was to help make the site even more unique (and sexy!) by creating a library of music visualisations – these provide some eye candy whilst you listen to tracks on a band’s page (or in their embedded player). We strived to avoid the clichéd, generic approach to visualisations (you know what I’m talking about) by giving the user something a wee bit special to gawk at. It wouldn’t be fair if ears got all the love!
Here’s a few quick screengrabs of the first 5 visualisations (more visualisations are on their way soon)…
The power behind the visuals is a customised version of the AS3 music visualisation engine I’ve been working on for some time now, which includes beat detection and a whole host of other methods for interpreting a stream, ready for visualising.
The guys at Bandcamp have been really supportive in allowing me to develop this library with a view to releasing the API in order for Flash developers to build and upload their own visualisations for use within the Bandcamp player.
Furthermore, because the visualiser has been a pet project of mine since the release of AS3, come December I’ll be open sourcing the engine so that anyone can build on it, or simply use it out of the box to produce some optical delights of their own.
Anyway, I’m really excited that Bandcamp has been unleashed on the public and I encourage you to check it out, especially if you’re a musician, or like music, or pretty visuals, or cool technologies, or great ideas, or websites…
Want to know more about Bandcamp?
Then watch the screencast (bellow) and chat about it on Vimeo, browse on over to bandcamp.mu, peruse the FAQs and see it in action!
Justin, your work never fails to impress me.
This sounds like a really interesting project and I can’t wait to explore it more.
But what I’m really waiting for you code release, I’m already dreaming up applications. Thanks for sharing.
Lawrie.
(Ps. the bars visuals in the video look stunning!)
great stuff! Iooks like the vizualizers are not hooked up to the audio on the 20 minute loop url?
the equalizer is the best visualization. nice work. love the reordering and stage spin.
awsome stuff. I did a few flash things with sound lately, but yours is probably one of the best i’ve seen arround.
great work
Hey Felix – Did you have any other tabs open? Having YouTube / Vimeo etc (and probably the stream in the demo above) playing in another window causes security errors with ComputeSpectrum!
We’ve set it to stop the visualisations when it catches that error, so I would presume that was what you were experiencing. It’s an annoying Flash Player feature / bug. We’ll look at maybe ghosting it out and / or putting some kind of notification in the visualisations, cheers for the heads up though :) Hope all is good with Airtight!
impressive….your works saves my life during developing boring audio and video as3 stuff :)
you are a great designer!
best
gary
http://www.onlinelib.de
You r crazy man! You did it again. Thanks
This is the best music engine in as3 i have seen,i can’t waiting for your source~ thx very much
That is amazing man, some stunning visualizations there. It is amazing what you can do with just some frequency data :)
“Furthermore, because the visualiser has been a pet project of mine since the release of AS3, come December I’ll be open sourcing the engine so that anyone can build on it, or simply use it out of the box to produce some optical delights of their own.”
[Q]. Has this “engine” been open sourced yet? I tried finding it but maybe I missed it, can this be downloaded from somewhere? I found the older post with the download (single FLA) , but I am assuming this is different.
Wonderful work. Beautiful Blog.