Key Of Grey

April 18th, 2009 – To celebrate one of the few sunny days in a long time, I’ve decided to hole up in my dark basement and make some music. Since my Korg Triton is out of commission with a power supply issue I was unable to fix last weekend, I decided to play around with Hobnox’s AudioTool.

AudioTool is a little music playground built in Flash (so if you want to play around in it, you’ll need to have Flash installed). It includes a few instruments and effects boxes that you plug into each other and a mixer to create music. The Monome-style instrument (my personal favorite) and the drum machines are step based, which makes it easy to get acclimatized.

I liked trying out the various effects and setting up loops. The sounds you can get out of AudioTool are surprisingly full and of good quality. Of course, you’ll want to record your masterpiece, and it’s here that I found AudioTools a bit immature. Apparently the option to record your session is a new feature, and it is pretty limited. Basically you can record what you’re trying out. but you cannot sequence the entire song. With my session lagging, I was not able to turn on and off machines as precisely as I wanted since the slow scrolling was speed inhibiting. This also means, since you’re using your mouse, that you can only focus on one piece of “gear” at a time. If they add a simple sequencer so that users can set up a full song, I think AudioTool would be move beyond being just a fun toy.

Once the song was recorded, I set up an account so the song could be saved and downloaded. Though my recorded session only ran slightly longer than 5 minutes, it took over half an hour to save the song. It then took another couple minutes to add it to my account. I’m not sure what the delay was, but Hobnox may need to upgrade their servers. As well, as I explored the site, I was prompted to enter my account name and password while navigating to almost any page which was quite irritating.

Regardless of the criticisms, Hobnox’s AudioTools was pretty fun to play around with. I easily spent a couple hours testing it out. I’ve embedded a session I recorded below so you can get an idea of how it sounds. Every change including melodies had to be triggered live. AudioTools is free and works in your web browser.

Hobnox AudioTool via Synthopia