Director Article

This article deals with operations performed on sounds in internal or external casts—rather than SWA sounds in Director. SWA files play as they stream in. Sounds from internal or external casts do not play until they are fully downloaded. When attempting to loop sounds or have near instantaneous access to sounds, internal or external cast members should always be used. Avoid using SWA sounds for random playback purposes, because these sounds must be downloaded each time they are played.

Internal or external cast sounds can be compressed quite dramatically (you can set the compression ratio), and Vismu deals with fairly short sounds (2-12 seconds long). This means that the individual audio clips download very quickly. In fact, using Vismu is better than being able to cache non-cast member sound files. Even if it was possible to cache these files, you would also have to find a way to reliably stream multiple sounds at once, which would not be feasible using slow connection speeds. The streaming strategy implemented in Nio is pretty much optimal, given the form of Vismu.

Jim Andrews is developing new forms of music arising from interactive audio and also interactive alternatives to the music video. Nio has been featured in the New York Times, the Frankfurt Times, reviewed extensively by sites, scholars and radio, print, and television journalists, studied by students of music, and generally celebrated as an outstanding example of new media, and audio in particular. Andrews made all the sound with his voice and finger snapping, and created all the Lingo programming and Flash animations in Nio. His site, www.vispo.com , has been up since 1995 as the center of his artistic production as a programmer, writer, mathematician, visual poet, audio guy, and essayist. His business is art, full-time.