The latest and greatest version of Opera Mobile (version 12) has just been released, which includes support for lots of HTML 5 goodies, including WebGL. While it usually works great, I noticed that many sites, HTML apps and demos have not really been designed for the mobile platform. In this post I will try to …
Author: Marcus Geelnard
Frank 4k WebGL demo – Lessons learned
So, I’ve just released my first proper 4k WebGL demo: Frank 4k! It’s a neat multi-part demo with 3D graphics and a low-fi synth tune, all written entirely in JavaScript (as far as I know, it’s the first of its kind). Try it here (compressed) or here (“safe mode”, no compression, with error checks etc). …
Muon Baryon in 6k JavaScript
I present to you my latest hack: Muon Baryon for JavaScript/WebGL. (Note: requires an HTML5/WebGL browser, a decent graphics card, and the pre-calculation time before the demo actually starts is quite long). The Original So, what is Muon Baryon? It’s a Windows 4k demo originally created by Youth Uprising, Ümlaüt Design and Outracks. More precisely, it’s …
Let’s make some music – online!
Music trackers for PCs have been around for decades, and I’ve personally used quite a few of them, starting with SoundTracker on the Amiga, and then various version and ProTracker, OctaMED, MadTracker and ReNoise, to name the ones I’ve used the most. Some time ago, I came across Sonant, which is a very specialized tracker. …
Sonant Live – sneak peek
Have been working on a web tool that I think is a bit different from the rest: It’s a music tracker that runs entirely in your browser! It’s currently a beta-release, but with some patience and training you can get it to do wonderful things. So try it out now: http://sonantlive.bitsnbites.eu/ The most annoying limitation …
Benchmarking different browsers with the synth
In an earlier post I mentioned that Opera performs very well with my JavaScript port of the software synth Sonant. Out of curiosity, I did some benchmarking of other browsers as well (this time on a quad core Xeon running Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit). Again, I tested the tune from the Muon Baryon demo (you can …
Impressive JavaScript performance!
I just compared the song generation time in the JavaScript port of Sonant to the hand optimized x86 assembler version of the same synth, as used in the original Muon Baryon 4k demo. I found the SNT tune here, and ran it in Opera in my new online Sonant player (check “Play Now!” if you …
JavaScript synth source released
For those who want to try out the JavaScript sound synth yourselves, I’ve released the source code. It’s available in a GIT repository over at Gitorious: https://gitorious.org/js-sonant/js-sonant. The code has been released under the zlib/libpng license, so use it as you wish. Many thanks to Jake Taylor (Ferris / Youth Uprising) for making the original Sonant …
Compression of JavaScript programs
In an earlier post I promised that I would come back to the topic of compressing JavaScript programs efficiently, so here we go… In this post, I’ll go through some techniques for creating self extracting, compressed JavaScript programs.
Doing a sound synth in JavaScript
For some time now I’ve been working on a software sound synthesizer for JavaScript. It all began when I found out about the WebGL 64k competion. Obviously, creating a full featured demo in a 64k JavaScript program poses several problems. The two problems that I found most interesting were: How do we do music in …