Bits & Bytes

Posts Tagged ‘sound’

Fixing Static Audio and Other Sound Problems

Many things can happen to cause various sound issues. Fortunately, there is a simple solution that works to fix almost all of them: Uninstall the sound driver.

To do that, first type “Device Manager” into the search box next to the Start button. This will bring up the option for the Device Manager application as shown.

Left-click the icon for the Device Manager, and this will open the Device Manager application window shown below.

Left-click the arrow next to “Sound, video and game controllers” and double-click the icon for your audio device.

This will open the Properties dialog for your device.

Then click the “Driver” tab, and you should see this:

Left-click “Uninstall Device” and you will see this dialog.

Left-click the box next to “Delete the driver software for this device,” and left-click the “Uninstall” button.

This will remove your drive. Restart your computer, and a new driver will be reinstalled automatically. This should fix your problem.

Generating Sounds in Actionscript 3.0

This program shows how to generate and play a sound. The generated sound is in the form of a sine wave, and it plays whenever the screen is clicked. Left-click the box above to hear the sound play.

The entire code to generate the sound is shown below. The first three lines just output the message “Click To Play.” The next two lines create a Sound object and an integer for the time. The two lines after that set callbacks for generating sound and responding to mouse clicks.

The rest of the program consists of the PlaySound() and Generator() functions. The PlaySound() function initializes the integer that keeps track of the sample time to 0 and then calls play() on the Sound object. The Generator() function writes 8192 samples at a time for the left and right channels; the generated sound is a sine wave that lasts half of a second, since sounds have 44100 samples per second.

// Output the initial instructions to user
var qInstructions:TextField = new TextField();
qInstructions.text = "Click To Play";
addChild(qInstructions);

var qSound:Sound = new Sound();
var iTime:int = 0;

qSound.addEventListener(SampleDataEvent.SAMPLE_DATA, Generator);
stage.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, PlaySound);

function PlaySound(e:Event):void {
	iTime = 0;
	qSound.play();
}

function Generator(event:SampleDataEvent):void {
	for (var i:int = 0; i < 8192; ++i) {
		// Play for half of a second
		if (iTime >= 22050) {
			return;
		}
		event.data.writeFloat(Math.sin(iTime/25));
		event.data.writeFloat(Math.cos(iTime/25));
		++iTime;
	}
}

Signal Processing Sound Data in Actionscript 3.0

This program demonstrates how to perform a signal processing operation on sound data and play it back. If you left-click the box above, you can hear the clip saying “XoaX.net” that I have been using in the other examples played at double speed. Note that if you want to hear the clip played a second time, you need to refresh the page.

The code is shown below. The first three lines output the “Click To Play” message. The next two lines create two Sound objects. The two lines after those set an event listener that is called when the file loads and then call load() to load the mp3 file.

The remaining code consists of three functions. The first function, FinishedLoading(), is called when the file is loaded since it was set as the callback. The FinishedLoading() function sets PlaySound() as a callback function for mouse clicks. Doing this prevents the PlaySound() from being called before the sound file is loaded.

The second function, PlaySound(), sets the DoubleSpeed() function as a callback when data is requested for the destination sound. Then it calls play(), which triggers a series of data requests as the sound plays.

The third function, DoubleSpeed(), calls the extract() function to retrieve data into the source byte array. Inside the while loop, each pair of source samples is averaged and then written into the destination array. Finally, the destination byte array is written back into the SampleDataEvent object.

// Output the initial instructions to user
var qInstructions:TextField = new TextField();
qInstructions.text = "Click To Play";
addChild(qInstructions);

var qSrc:Sound		= new Sound();
var qDest:Sound		= new Sound();

qSrc.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, FinishedLoading);
qSrc.load(new URLRequest("http://www.xoax.net/public/XoaXDotNet.mp3"));

function FinishedLoading(e:Event):void {
	stage.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, PlaySound);
}

function PlaySound(e:Event):void {
	qDest.addEventListener(SampleDataEvent.SAMPLE_DATA, DoubleSpeed);
	qDest.play();
}

function DoubleSpeed(e:SampleDataEvent) {
	var qSrcBytes:ByteArray = new ByteArray();
	qSrc.extract(qSrcBytes, 8192);
	var qDestBytes:ByteArray = new ByteArray();
	var dLeft:Number = 0;
	var dRight:Number = 0;
	qSrcBytes.position = 0;
	// Read and average two samples
	while (qSrcBytes.bytesAvailable > 0) {
		dLeft = qSrcBytes.readFloat();
		dRight = qSrcBytes.readFloat();
		if (qSrcBytes.bytesAvailable > 0) {
			dLeft = (dLeft + qSrcBytes.readFloat())/2.0;
			dRight = (dRight + qSrcBytes.readFloat())/2.0;
			qDestBytes.writeFloat(dLeft);
			qDestBytes.writeFloat(dRight);
		}
	}
	e.data.writeBytes(qDestBytes);
}
 

© 2007–2024 XoaX.net LLC. All rights reserved.