Project Evaluation

The project brief was to create an interactive flash-based sample player with original recorded sound. I decided to create my player in Flash CS3 using Actionscript 3.0. This began as quite a challenge, but as I began looking at the help sections I felt I was slowly starting to get to grips with the new language.

Researching previously made flash players was quite interesting because they seemed to all look pretty similar in design. Most of the players seemed to just mimic an actual stereo player with the same play, pause stop buttons and a silver interface to smarten it up. I knew that this isn’t how I wanted mine to end up, so I researched into some players that took a different slant on the flash player idea. Andras Szonyi’s player was probably my favourite because he uses interaction for the purpose of art, with beautiful drawings linked with sound to create an unusual Internet experience. I liked this idea and wanted to incorporate art into my own interface rather than just creating a standard flash player with sliders and knobs.

My player began as a quite a complex idea which was based on a puppet show, and as the user used the keyboard keys to move the puppets up and down the sounds would play. However, as I started to make this there were too many problems, such as the different keyboard keys for each puppet and so on. So, I decided to simplify my idea into characters which when clicked on they would make a noise, and as the character was dragged up the bar the sample volume would increase. To make the sounds for this idea I made instruments and then recorded samples with an external microphone into garage band. I was faced with a problem when I exported my sounds as an MP3 file into Garageband because the programme automatically added a 2 second silence on to the end of each sample, so it didn’t loop properly when it was imported into flash. To solve this I edited all the sounds in Sound Forge afterwards.

After testing my player I found quite a few problems with the usability of it. For example the loops on the samples were set to loop too many times, which caused all the sounds to clash next to each other. So to solve this I made the drums and percussion instruments loop more than the sound effect samples. The volume slider worked out well, and people understood that it got louder as the face was pulled up. To make sure people understood how to use the whole player, I put some simple instructions up on the first page.

Although my player is quite simple, I felt it help me understand Actionscript 3.0 a little more as now I can make basic mouse clicks and slides, and import sounds, which will encourage me to try and learn more now that I can do the basics.