Mucking around with #Audiotool from hobnox.com. Uh. That'll be fun :) (Trying Again! Work Video...)
(download)
Well, this was a hell of a lot of fun :). I'm not really from the step-sequencer age of electronic music. Even when I tried FruityLoops (sorry, FL Studio), it left me in a bit of a lather of confusion with its piano roll editor and little lights. But I have always missed the immediacy of plugging a few bits of gear together, launching up a basic sequencer, and just plugging straight away at it (I've had a little experience of this with my Korg Triton and some other MIDI hardware - it's very immediate). So this was an absolute pleasure.
Hobnox.com's Audiotool is a bit of a revalation. There's no comment here on sound quality, because I've just mucked around with it for 20 minutes, and the UI is so gorgeous, I might be being swayed by that (but initial impressions were pretty good :)), but for pure immediacy, fun and giggles, this is an awesome bit of web-software. We've only had VSTs on PC for 12 years, and 3rd party access has been around for around 10 years (and being honest, those early itterations of plugins were appalling - it's probably in the last 5 years that computer processing power has been up to the task of large numbers of instances of really great hardware emulations running concurrently). But this is all in a web browser. In Flash.And it's just. so. FUN :).The first couple of instruments show the Tenori-on styled player going through Gates+Bit Crusher (for one) and Reverb, Pitched Delay and another Bit Crusher for the other. There's a little TR-808-style drum machine next, then the TR-909, and finally the TB-303. What I really liked though was the inclusion of a Side-Chain compression 'pedal' - you can hear silly, extreme use at the end. There's so much more to muck around with in Audiotool, but for videos, I have mail-attachement limits :). So, I highly recommend you go and muck around with this - the UI is great (if a little picky), and its immediacy is hard to match. Oh - and just remember to connect cables to the output module! (Whoops - it does warn you though...) PS - this is a first attempt at a Jing upload, so hopefully the video will work.
