Topic Description:

Our project is called the AudioTron Media Player and Visualizer.  AudioTron is a web based MP3 player that can be embedded into an HTML page to present audio to the viewer.  A track listing is created via XML so the administrator of the web page can easily update the content of the player and it’s very easy for the user not only to go to the next and previous tracks, but also be able to select the track of their choice at any time.

AudioTron includes a music visualizer which creates visual patterns and alters the patterns based on the data values of the MP3.  To do this we take advantage of a number of ActionScript’s Media classes, including “computeSpectrum” which, according to Adobe’s documentation “takes a snapshot of the current sound wave and places it into the specified ByteArray Object.”  This snapshot is taken a number of times a second and each time it’s taken, it adjusts the visuals accordingly.

Requirements:

AudioTron is a project where we spent quite a bit of time planning with analysis, design and implementation that we learned in class.  For inception we developed use case diagrams, fully dressed use cases, and a domain model.  In the Elaboration Phase we used a design model and a state diagram and we coded in the Flash Environment with ActionScript 3.0 and ended up with over 20 different classes using a number of patterns we had learned in class.

One of the big challenges of the team was to figure out the ideal technology to be used to develop our project.   Erik has solid C++ development skills, Andrew is an ActionScript developer and Brent was quite open to working in any language since he had some JAVA experience, but mostly in an academic setting.  Though we all thought JAVA would be a good solution we figured it would be ideal for the group to come up with an idea and base the language on the project idea and, since we were going to create a web based audio visualizer, ActionScript 3.0 seemed to be the right language to use.