I’m happy to announce I received my Golden Ticket to speak at the next 360 Flex conference in Washington DC. The conference will be held at the Hilton DC North Gaithersburg, September 19 – 22, 2010.
I’m going to 360 Flex DC, and so should you
I spoke at the last 360|Flex in San Jose, but I’m already more excited for the DC conference, and here’s why.
I’m speaking about the most exciting part of the Flash Platform, AIR2
The last 360 Flex I spoke at was in San Jose and it rocked. The city of San Jose bored me to tears, but I felt like I was living inside my twitter feed for three days. My presentation was on the final day of 360 Flex, so I spent most of the conference preparing, and sitting in a few sessions here and there. I spent almost half of my time in San Jose working and still met 10-15 of my twitter buddies, not to mention all the new contacts I met. In a nutshell, if you attend a 360 Flex conference, you will meet the community. In fact, you’d have to try pretty hard to not meet the Flex community.
If this sounds up your alley, go ahead and register to take advantage of the early adopter ticket price of $450. I’m not sure when the ticket price will go up to $599, but I know it will so act fast. If you make it to DC, be sure to find me and introduce yourself. I promise it will be a good time.
In case you missed the June RMAUG meeting, my band The Compilers played our first hybrid concert and presentation show. Who are The Compilers? As far as I know, we’re Denver CO’s only Tech Funk Fusion trio that use internet technology along with analog instruments. By day we’re internet programmers, and by night we’re rockers. Right now majority of our software revolves around the Flash Platform, so it was only natural that we play at RMAUG.
Below is a recap of our setlist, and notes about the technology we presented on. When you see mentions of a Flash movie, these are not run as standalone SWF files. They are actually played by our Flex based Compilers Live Player. This application runs on our guitarist Jun Heider’s laptop, and the entire app is controlled over MIDI, via a Behringer FCB1010 Foot Controller, MMJ, and MERAPI.
Intro Song
For the first song of our set we decided to use a funny and informative Flash movie to give the audience a hint at what they’re about to see. For the June RMAUG show, this movie was updated to include spoken thank you slides for the companies that make our technology, and special shout outs to all the people who help us put on a great show.
For our iPhone song we have another entertaining Flash movie that gets played during my iPhone solo part. Both this song, and the Flash movie where updated a bit for RMAUG. Unfortunately Soundbooth crashed on us when saving the recording of our live set, so I can’t play a clip for the remixed iPhone song, but you can watch the updated iPhone Flash movie.
This song is pretty straight forward when it comes to technology. We have a backing Flash movie that plays scenes from the ZeroWing video game, as well as the ‘All Your Base’ iPhone app for ZeroWing audio samples. I’m not including anything for this song besides, if you’ve seen us play before, this song now has a reggae feel to it. Prior to this show, ‘All Your Base’ was a hard driving all your punk are belong to us.
Sleep Tick
This is one of our original rock tunes which has been given a minor touch of technology. There is a middle part that I now break out into an iPhone solo, and we also have an AIR 2 powered audio visualizer. This particular app is one of the most exciting for me because I’ve been waiting for the day when we can use getMicrophone to pull raw data. Instead of explaining this one, you can watch it instead.
Tweet Jam v2
I’m happy to report our crown jewel of internet technology and audience interaction mashup “Tweet Jam”, has reached version 2. Both the song and the application have been rewritten especially for the RMAUG show. TweetJam is an instrumental jam song where the audience tweets at @thecompilers during our show, then our Roboreader application imports the @mentions and reads them back to the crowd via robot voice. Since our application reads the live Twitter feed, you don’t have to be at our shows to participate! A final point of interest for this application is that I run this on my laptop and control it using a wired XBOX 360 controller. There’s not much more to explain, but there is a video showing it in action.
James vs. Rick
Our final song of the night uses two applications. One is a game for the audience, and the other is a simple audio app. The game is an AIR application that connects to the ‘phone game company’ MegaPhone service and displays a specially assigned 888 telephone number, and a range of numbers to press in order to vote for James Brown ( 0 – 4 ) or Rick James ( 5 – 9 ). When a player calls in and presses a number from a specific range, our AIR app will play an appropriate audio sample while we’re playing. Our AIR app keeps track and displays the running vote count, then at the end of the song we fade and play a funny video from the winner.
The second application ‘Funky Funky’ is a simple AIR2 application that uses NativeProcess to say “Funky Funky”. While this doesn’t sound like anything noteworthy, it’s a perfect application for this particular jam because OSX’s SAY command has a voice called “Bells” that speaks in a melody that matches the song we’re playing. Of course this doesn’t make much sense not knowing what the song sounds like, so here’s the actual application for you download and try out. Note, this is an AIR2 app that uses NativeProcess, so this is an OSX only application.
So there you go, proof that the Flash Platform rocks! I haven’t thought of any rocking ending other than, go check out AIR2. The Flash Platform is no longer restricted to the browser. Let all the HTML heads keep the browser, I want to rock on stage with Flash.
If you missed The Compilers at RMAUG, we are playing at Ignite Denver 7 on July 27th. If you can’t make that show, be sure to at least tweet @thecompilers on July 27th to get yourself heard.
Be sure to check out The Compilers World for information from the future of the internet rock trenches.
Hey, we should jam! Yeah, we totally should. No seriously, we should jam sometime. We can play bad 80s cover songs and play under the name April Fools.
That’s the gist of how my current band formed. A handful of computer programmers who used to play in bands decided it was time to get back on the music horse. At first we had five or so people interested in jamming and seeing where things go. A few jams later and we were down to the power trio that is now known as The Compilers.
The name of the group didn’t come around until a month or so after we had been jamming as the April Fool’s. All three of us are internet programmers who work with Adobe’s Flash platform, as well as contribute to our local Adobe community. About the time we officially became a power trio we were kicking around the idea of becoming the house band for our local user group meetings ( RMAUG ). In the process of laughing this one out, we were asked by RMAUG to play an upcoming Adobe technical event that was happening in two weeks. That technical event was the “Next Generation Flex & Coldfusion Tour“.
At first we were hesitant booking a show when we didn’t have a real band, or enough material to play a show. Long story short, we decided to play the show, decided to name the band The Compilers, and decided we should probably integrate some sort of tech into this show. We didn’t set out wanting to mix technology with music, it just seemed appropriate for this first gig to do something technical. That technical music nugget is now known as Tweet Jam, our smash hit that plays tweets from @thecompiler‘s Twitter timeline while the band plays underneath the robot voice.
That first show was fun, funny, and the beginning of an interesting musical project. In the last six months we’ve played four shows, and we gave a presentation at the 360|MAX unconference at Adobe MAX 2009 in Los Angeles, CA. This really isn’t a lot of gigs, but considering we started this band in June, it’s been quite a whirlwind of musical and technical action. Jun has built at least three versions of the TweetJam application, as well as integrated his midi foot controller with TheCompilers Flex player. I’ve gotten pretty comfortable playing iPhone, made a few Flash movies for our set, and started looking into sound generation with Sonoflash. Scottie has been the mad scientist behind the green velvet curtain. Drummer man, electric drummer man, sound man, idea man, recorder man, crazy Brazillian ghord instrument player.
It’s so great to be back in a band. These last six months have been a blast, and it was all started from a few jokes. Speaking of jokes, below you will find two flash movies that I built for our 360|MAX presentation, as well as our talk. The concept of melding tech with music is new to us, so this talk was a bit off the cuff, but it was still a great time.
360|MAX assets
It’s a Laser! – My first experiment with the Sonoflash library. Adjust your laser properties then click shoot. Each slider has a keyboard listener. Attack = A, Release = R, and Frequency = F.
Click to launch the laser maker
By Note – This sample is the beginning of layering sounds and controlling notes and octaves. This one can play the major notes C, D, E, F, G, A, B using your keyboard and the play button. The octave controller on the right is powered by mouseover, 1 is low and 9 is high. The sounds also have keyboard listeners. Laser = 1 and Ping = 2. Note, the event listeners don’t kick in until after you’ve clicked a button, so it may be quirky at first. I built this on the plane ride out to LA and couldn’t figure that one out.
Click to launch this madness
360|MAX presentation : “Geek Rock with the Flash Platform”
I’m going to 360 Flex DC, and so should you 
