* UPDATE : all the videos were originally made and hosted at http://screentoaster.com which is now defunct. I will get these videos updated someday. Sorry for the loss.
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.
Watch Flash Intro Movie
I want an iPhone
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.
Watch Flash iPhone Movie
All your base, are belong to us
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.
http://www.screentoaster.com/swf/STPlayer.swf
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.
The Flash Platform Rocks!
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.
Photos
The Compilers Next Show
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.
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