Now it is possible to pan mono sounds dynamically in stereo using only the Quicktime Xtra!
This little Director shockwave movie shows how Lingo can communicate with Quicktime wired sprites
For best results, play this movie with headphones or decently placed stereo speakers.
Wired sprites are interactive media elements used in Quicktime sprite tracks. They can respond to mouse and keyboard input, exchange custom messages, and control a large number of the properties of other Quicktime tracks and objects.
There are no Lingo commands which allow custom messages to be sent between Director and Quicktime wired sprites. Wired sprites can send messages to their environment, but Director currently ignores them. I hope Macromedia fixes this shortcoming in a future version of the Quicktime Xtra.
It is possible, however, for Director to enable and disable tracks in a Quicktime movie...
The Quicktime movie embedded inside the Director movie above contains an audio track and eight 'dummy' sprite tracks, each one representing one bit of a 'byte'. When you click on a stereo panning button, the Director movie converts an integer from 0 to 255 into a string of eight bits and uses this data to enable or disable the appropriate tracks.
An additional (wired) sprite (the vertical black line) polls the other eight tracks on idle, gathering the current byte of information from the configuration of enabled / disabled tracks and sets the pan of the audio track appropriately. Notice that the wired sprite also moves horizontally in relation to the pan setting.
The wired sprite movie was created using totallyHip's LiveStage
Full documentation of this technique is being prepared. For those who are very keen to look behind the scenes, you may wish to download a binhexed stuffit archive containing the LiveStage project and a Director7 movie. You can open the LiveStage project by downloading the public beta of LiveStage Pro from totallyHip's website. With the demo version you can examine/edit the project and export a wired Quicktime movie of your own.
b |
a |
c |
k |
s |
t |
a |
g |
e |