Adobe made some creepy noise
Published by André Michelle October 16th, 2008 in newsWhat a bummer. Adobe finally released Flash Player 10 including the new sound enhancements this website asked for. Unlike the promising improvements in the release candidates Adobe released in public, the actual Release Player is neither working as expected nor had Adobe told developers that there will come significant changes in the Sound API.
What changed?
The internal sound control asks Actionscript for more audio data, when the sound card is running out of data. The number of samples you provide can vary between 2048 (~46ms) and 8192 (~185ms). For instance in the Hobnox AudioTool we sent 2048 samples to the sound card and it worked like a charm. This is not the case anymore. Furthermore if you provide more samples once, the latency will increase at runtime and there is no way to decrease it again without stopping the playback. We used to send more data, when expecting CPU critical processes like creating plugins or scale the desktop in our application. That way we could reserve some space for intensive computation while the longer audio buffer was playing. Well, this is also not working anymore. Passing 8192 samples also leads to the enormous latency time of almost one second.
The worst part is in fact, that we were not informed about any of these changes. We would have had some time to react and adapt. Right now this is quite disappointing.
It worked before! What are these changes good for?
More information
Joa Ebert blog
Andre Michelle blog
Joe Berkovitz blog
Kai-Philipp Schöllmann blog
8 Responses to “Adobe made some creepy noise”
- 1 Pingback on Oct 17th, 2008 at 5:53 am
- 2 Pingback on Oct 21st, 2008 at 12:23 pm
That is really a bummer. What is the intention of the changes? And what now?
I’m curious about your complaint of lack of time to make changes. I can understand if you’re upset Adobe didn’t detail the changes to how sounds are handled internally. However, Flash Player 10 has been in public beta for many moons now, did you not know about it? I’ve been testing my apps for a couple months now on the beta.
Flash Player 10 has been in public beta for many moons now. Did you not know the beta was available, or did the changes not show up until sometime between the last release candidate and the actual release?
For sound enhancement frontrunners like André, of course this is very frustrating.
I can’t say that I can judge the matter from a fully informed point of view, but to me it seems that there have been some issues with sound configuration on Linux systems.
As you probably know, Linux support has been a huge priority for Astro, and first tests on Linux systems show indeed stunning stability and performance, which both have been major pains occasionally in earlier releases.
Then, most of all, sound handling is still far from being as consistent on Linux systems as it is with Mac OS X or Windows (can you say sound multiplexing and Linux in one sentence?), so I am willing to attribute this last-minute-change to a commitment to fully functional software (you can get away with glitches for Linux systems in the beta version, but not in the final release).
Still, I totally agree that direct and vivid communication indeed has been a staple in the developer / community communication for the last few years, so last minute changes are likely to raise a few eyebrows.
I’m curious about statements from the Adobe camp, too.
Best regards
C.
@Shannon:
As you could have read in the post: These changes we are complaining about just appeard in the FP10 Release Player.
Dudes, log a bug in the Flash Player bugbase and tell everyone so we can vote for it already.