submitted by 'readyrickshaw'

(55)

A couple weeks ago, I was listening to "Feed The Animals" by Girl Talk (a "mashup" artist), and the names of some of the samples were right at the tip of my tongue, but I couldn't quite get them. What I really wanted was a music player that would show which samples were playing, so I put together http://feedtheanimalssamples.com. I gave myself a week to do it, and amazingly, I almost made that deadline, mostly because a bunch of things really came together nicely that I wasn't expecting. For example:

- I don't know the first thing about creating a flash player. I thought I might pay somebody a few hundred dollars on elance to do it, but then I found SoundManager..it's a really simple javascript library for playing audio. It took quite a bit of DHTML work, but I'm pretty satisfied with the result; the player is more responsive than the flash players I've used, and it integrates more nicely with the page. It occurs to me now that we're at the very beginning of what's possible with javascript.

- After I finished writing the player, I was planning to have users identify the samples. It would have been a mess--I was planning to go through the submissions manually, and it would have taken a long time and a ton of work to fill out the whole album. But then, as if I'd won some sort of contest, I found the wikipedia article for the album. Wikipedia contributers are incredible! I just had to copy the table from the source for the page, do a bit of cleanup on it, and convert it to javascript.

I don't have a windows machine, so the site doesn't work in Internet Explorer yet, but I've got my fingers crossed that the intersection between IE users and Girl Talk fans is small.

If you have feedback, let me know in the comments.

readyrickshaw a year ago tags:mashups music girl talk

(6)

If you ever really want to take advantage of the Flash runtime then I would recommend the haXe compiler. It's actually a pretty nice language (not ''quite'' AS3 but close enough). I have some stuff from here.

wreel a year ago tags:programming haxe flash