What is the Amplitude Xtra? Amplitude
Xtra allows Macromedia Director movies to respond in
real time to the amplitude data derived from
sound cast members. Amplitude data is an accurate
representation of the relative loudness of the sound
over time - in other words, it represents
the waveform of the sound. The xtra sends
a continuous stream of amplitude values to Director
while a sound is playing. This means that,
amongst other things, you can, - synchronize sprite animations
and properties to sounds in Director
- draw sound
waveforms using normal Director sprites in real time
at any resolution
- achieve lip-sync between animated characters
and spoken dialogue
- change inks and blend properties
in time with sound and music
- create sound
visualizations based on amplitude intensity using Imaging Lingo
or Shockwave 3D
The Amplitude xtra, - works with
internal sound cast members (including SWA and MP3)
- works with externally linked WAVE, AIFF, SWA and
MP3 files
- works with Director 7, 8, 8.5,
MX and MX2004 (including 10.1)
- is cross-platform (Windows,
MacOS 8/9, MacOS X)
- is safe for use
with Shockwave
- works with streaming Shockwave audio
The
xtra has a number of Lingo functions for
setting parameters and receiving amplitude data. There are
also a number of easily configurable xtra properties,
including, - resolution - determines the number of amplitude
data values per second that get sent to
Director
- scale - determines the scale used for
amplitude values. Can be any value between 1
and 32767
- smooth data - smoothes the data
resulting in less rapid fluctuations between amplitude values
which means smoother animations, etc.
The Amplitude and
AmplitudePro Xtras There are two editions of the
xtra; the Amplitude Xtra and the AmplitudePro Xtra. This page deals with the
standard Amplitude Xtra. The AmplitudePro Xtra incorporates all
the functionality of the standard xtra plus spectrum
analysis so now you can use frequency power
values derived from sound cast members in Director.
The Xtras Compared Which xtra to use? Use
the Amplitude Xtra if you want to: - do
animations in synch with the loudness (amplitude) of
sound or music.
- lip-sync animated characters to spoken
dialog
- draw sound waveforms
Use the AmplitudePro Xtra
if you want to: - do anything you can
do with the Amplitude Xtra, plus...
- create frequency-based
visualizations of sounds using normal Director sprites, imaging
Lingo or Shockwave 3D.
- synchronize animations to frequency
values.
- create graphical EQ displays.
The following table
lists the features available in each xtra. What's
new in version 3 - compatibility with Director 11
and Shockwave 11
- a Universal Binary version of
the Macintosh xtra that runs natively on Intel
and PPC Macs
- compatibility with Windows Vista
- backwards
compatibilty with Director 8 - 10.x on both
Windows and Macintosh platforms
- enhanced control of amplitude
smoothing
- support for sound members using 48KHz sample
rate
- support for MP3 files using Variable Bit
Rate (VBR) and Joint-Stereo encoding
Bug fixes include:
- invalid data output and occasional crashing when processing
unsupported compressed WAVE files.
- incorrect data to be
generated when the sound file has many cuepoints
- amplitude dB scale returning -1 for silence in
some sound files
- normalize bug resulting in negative
values when processing some linked sound files
- invalid
data being generated with the resolution property =
1
This version of the Amplitude Xtra also
marks the end of the Macintosh Classic (OS8-9)
xtra. A MacOS X Carbon-only version of the
xtra is included in the v3.0 package for
backwards compatibility with Director/Shockwave 10 and earlier.
Process amplitude data | Yes | Yes |
Process spectrum
data | No | Yes | Normalize sound data | Yes | Yes | Mono/Stereo sound processing | Yes | Yes | dB scaling of amplitude
data | Yes | Yes | Smoothing of amplitude data | Yes |
Yes |
Streaming audio support | Yes | Yes | Shockwave safe | Yes | Yes |
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