Flash! Virtual Instruments Go Mobile

Todd "Mobile Views" Ogasawara just tipped me off to Hobnox Audiotool, a free electronic music studio that runs online in Flash. My first thought was that it looked like Propellerhead ReBirth reborn in a Web browser. But Audiotool points the way to an interesting musical future.

Hobnox Audiotool is an online electronic music studio based on emulations of Roland TR-808, TR-909, and TB-303 drum machines and synths. You also get a selection of modeled Boss effect pedals to drag around the screen and plug together. (Click to enlarge.)

ReBirth, of course, is the pioneering virtual studio composed of two software drum machines and two software bass synths, all modeled on old Roland hardware. It rocked the world when it came out more than a decade ago. I remember being in the hotel room where it was announced and watching a horde of weary, jaded journalists spring from their seats and rush the computer at the front of the room. Propellerhead has long since moved on to the vastly more powerful Reason program, and now offers ReBirth for free in the ReBirth Museum.

Audiotool has its own rough edges. As Eliot Van Buskirk reports, the online app has to use a Frankenstein of Flash and Java to offer interactive audio; Van Buskirk points to a campaign to bring Flash up to speed sonically. I spent an hour playing with Audiotool and found music-making tedious. When you have only a mouse to adjust a studio's worth of knobs and buttons, progress is sloooow. (ReBirth supports MIDI control, so you can map actual knobs to the onscreen ones; here's hoping Flash gets MIDI support soon as well.) Audiotool's sound quality isn't up to the ReBirth level yet either, and there's currently no way to export the music you make as a WAV file. I started to use a streamripper to capture the music from the browser, but then made an adjustment and lost sound completely.

Adjusting controls with a mouse is tedious, but the tutorial offers some shortcuts: Press Shift-1, 2, or 3 to zoom in and out, and Shift-A to bring up a navigation box. (Click to enlarge.)

But just as hardware evolved into software in the first Roland-to-ReBirth transition, it won't be long before online instruments like Audiotool settle comfortably into mobile devices. Already, top synth manufacturer Korg has released a virtual MS-10 synth as a Nintendo cartridge. I wouldn't be surprised to find the iPhone soon ships with software instruments the way GarageBand showed up as a full-fledged member of the Macintosh. And this time, the interface could be a highlight. It's amazing what you can do with the basic x-y pad on a Korg Kaossilator synth; couple that with the iPhone's multitouch screen and we could have gorgeous new instruments to go.

What are your favorite handheld virtual instruments? Please leave a link.