While in Amsterdam, I debuted Synthia, the first publicly usable musical instrument to emerge from Project Ludi at Almer/Blank Labs.

Synthia on the web, is a Flash 10 application that translates pictures into music -- infinite classical canons -- using a small set of rules that establish key, restricted notes within the key, tempo, instrumentation and the score.

I actually developed Synthia as a demonstration app to accompany my talk, 'Hearing Pictures' (which went really well at FITC Amsterdam, and which you can see at FITC Toronto in April), but the results were so fun to play with, that we decided to make it a publicly usable web-application, where anyone can upload any picture, have Synthia turn it into music, and then share it with your friends and embed it in any web page.

We will be posting a lot more about Synthia in the coming weeks, and updating her rules and features over the coming months. But, for now, I'd encourage all of you to play around with the Synthia Composer (just upload an image and listen), or just browse the gallery to hear what other pictures sound like.

And, if while playing with Synthia, you have some ideas on how we might commercialize her, share your thoughts and ideas for a chance to win an iPad.

Share and enjoy!

-r

For those who've been reading this blog for a few months, you might recall my mentioning a few times about my side work on translating pictures into music -- and specifically, the Synesthesizer, a musical instrument that works by translating pictures into music, utilizing metaphors inspired by synesthesia.

Well, I've done a bit better than that -- way better than we could get the Synesthesizer to work. In fact, we at Almer/Blank Labs, have just completed the finishing touches on a new software-based musical instrument that we are debuting at FITC Amsterdam.

Her name is Synthia. And I wish I could tell you more about her right now. But that will have to wait another 133 hours. Because Synthia will debut on February 22nd, at 5PM CET (Amsterdam Time) / 9AM PST (California Time).

She will debut as soon as I complete my talk, Hearing Pictures, I will be able to tell you more about her. In addition to the release of Synthia, the talk itself will be *really* good. I've given a lot of talks, and this is going to be, by far, the best and most exciting.

If you're planning to be at FITC Amsterdam, then you will most definitely not want to miss this talk @ 4PM in Shaffyyzaal on Day 1, Monday, February 22nd.

Share and enjoy!

-r

Enrollment lasts for 90 days, and this course is free to enroll only through February 15th, and only through this link.

'Comprehensive ActionScript 3' includes over 9 hours of training, from the following courses:

- Practical ActionScript 3
- Understanding and Working with Events in ActionScript 3
- Understanding and Working with Event Broadcasters in ActionScript 3
- ActionScript 3 for Flash Video
- The Webcam, CuePoints and Captions in Flash Video with ActionScript 3

So, go ahead and do yourself a favor, and enroll.

Share and enjoy!

-r

And, of course, between these two versions, the sample code in my courses posted at Adobe has become unusable.

After getting a few email requests from developers, I decided tonight to sit down and update the files for the first course -- the course in building a progressive video player in OSMF.

So, if you would like, you can get that update here.

The primary difference is that basically EVERY EVENT has changed names and types. So I had to hunt them down through the documentation, one at a time -- which I did. And also, they changed the name of the media player instance -- again -- this time, to 'media' (nee 'player', nee 'element').

Please note that I didn't really update the comments to reflect the changes to the event names and locations.

And if you're all very, very, very nice, I might consider updating the files for the Dynamic Multibitrate Streaming Player also

Share and enjoy!

-r

Aside from my standard work load, I've been consumed with two projects. One is the Ludi Machine, which I'm getting into shape for FITC Amsterdam at the end of February (there are still seats available for my workshop on Events in AS3 on February 21st in Amsterdam).

The other item that's been consuming my time has been the revamp of the Rich Media Institute website -- the first real overhaul to the public website since 2006. Among the new features we've recently launched:

• Totally overhauled catalog
  Making it much easier for you to browse the courses
• New shopping cart
  You can buy as many courses as you like at once, and you don't need to use paypal
• New European video server
  So our customers in Europe and Asia can view our training as well as our American ones
• Public forums
  So you can ask questions and follow news of the RMI without having to enroll in a course
• Brand new products
  We're constantly adding new courses to the site, including the FDT training and new combo courses, including Comprehensive ActionScript 3, which has over 9 hours of training content

So, the changes to the RMI are pretty exciting. And, following the launch of the new site, I'm teaching some new workshops that I wanted to let you all know about:

New Compilation Online Training
Comprehensive ActionScript 3 (over 9 hours of training)
Comprehensive Flash Video (5 and a half hours)

New Live Workshops
Practical ActionScript 3 on May 1st
Mastering ActionScript 3 Events on May 8th
Purchase both together and save $75

And, because of the new system, we are offering the option to enroll in the online training and live workshops at the same time -- so you can start accessing the online training immediately, and then get your face-to-face training when the workshop day comes.

Combo Live and Online Workshops
Practical ActionScript 3 online and live on May 1st
Mastering ActionScript 3 Events online and live on May 8th
Comprehensive AS3 9 hours of online training and both live workshops on May 1st and 8th

We're using these to gauge customer interest in these sorts of new and unique training opportunities. So please spread the word.

The Comprehensive AS3 - Live and Online is particularly great value. For $425 you get 9 hours of online training and 12 classroom hours, with me teaching you AS3 -- I've worked on these courses for years now, and it really is the best AS3 training available.

All of our online training, and all of my live workshops, are on sale through all of February, and you can save an additional 10% with the code 'rblank9'.

Share and enjoy!

-r

It's 35 minutes across five lessons and takes you through the process of converting the progressive OSMF video player (which we create in the first installment of this course on Building Progressive Video Players with Adobe OSMF, into a dynamic multi-bitrate streaming player. Multi-bitrate streaming occurs when you program your Flash to deliver the highest quality video a viewer can see (dependent on their bandwidth). *Dynamic* multi-bitrate streaming is similar, with the additional feature of having your player constantly meters the bandwidth throughout viewing, to adjust the playback between multiple videos seamlessly, as the viewer's bandwidth may fluctuate.

Please note: that the first course on progressive video players was built with OSMF Sprint 5. The second course on streaming with OSMF was built with OSMF Sprint 7. I spend the first lesson of the new course updating the progressive player to work with Sprint 7, and I wrote a few notes about the major differences between OSMF 0.5 and 0.7 in a post on this blog last month. Also note that, by the time the course was published by Adobe, OSMF had already moved forward to Spring 8.

When I wrote the first course on building a progressive video player with OSMF, I was struck by two things:
1) OSMF is clean -- really clean -- and it just works well in ways that the AS3 video API does not -- for instance, with OSMF setting volume is a matter of talking to the volume property of the MediaPlayer
2) OSMF felt like a bit of overkill -- you need a lot of imports and classes (a MediaPlayer, a MediaElement, a NetLoader and a URLResource) just to build the simplest of progressive video players -- that would be simple enough, requiring seven lines of code with raw AS3 if you knew it

But, I had a hunch that #2 above was due to the fact that I was using approximately 0.05% of this powerful framework -- like trying to use a nuclear bomb when a shovel would do just fine.

Well, when I started learning how to write the code to build dynamic multi-bitrate streaming player, I quickly learned that my hunch was right. The benefits of OSMF really kick in once you do anything beyond the most basic video player.

In the case of streaming, to convert your progressive OSMF video player to a streaming OSMF video player, all you do is change the URL! Seriously, that's it. OSMF is smart enough to know that when you try to load a video from an RTMP server, you're trying to stream -- and it takes care of the rest.

That was pretty neat. But the benefits really kicked in when I beefed my regular streaming OSMF video player to one that supports dynamic multi-bitrate streaming. All it took was just a few extra lines of code to turn my regular video player into one that supports dynamic multi-bitrate streaming. If you want to learn those lines of code, I'd recommend checking out the course.

As I say, I'm still just barely cracking the surface of OSMF, and I'm really looking forward to digging deeper into its support for layouts, playlists and monetization. But, even with this second course, the massive time, workflow and standardization features of OSMF are already revealing themselves.

Share and enjoy!

-r