Sonify.org to focus on mobile audio

[hp3]

As a developer with interest in mobile Flash for phones and PDAs you may be interested in the device audio resources at www.sonify.org, which are important if you plan to develop device audio content for FlashLite.

? Consumer demand for audio centric content, applications and services, is a leading growth area in the mobile device industry. The technical skills required for developing ringtones, sound in multimedia messaging, and sound for mobile gaming are becoming more important and more demanding. Sonify.org fills an important niche as the first site focusing on the technical and aesthetic aspects of integrating audio content into the mobile device media experience. ?

SAN FRANCISCO, CA ? October 18, 2004 ? Sonify.org, the online resource and community designed to further develop interactive audio for the Web and mobile devices, officially relaunched their Web site, www.sonify.org, with a new emphasis on audio for mobile devices, phones and PDAs.

Consumer demand for audio centric content, applications and services, is a leading growth area in the mobile device industry. The technical skills required for developing ringtones, sound in multimedia messaging, and sound for mobile gaming are becoming more important and more demanding. Sonify.org fills an important niche as the first site focusing on the technical and aesthetic aspects of integrating audio content into the mobile device media experience.

Sonify.org provides mobile audio industry news, tutorial resources, and discussion forums to educate ringtone and rich media content developers, mobile application developers, and business professionals about the value and impact of interactive audio for mobile devices.

Sonify.org offers site sponsorship opportunities for companies wishing to promote products or services to a niche community of audio oriented developers and is actively seeking technical writers who are interested in contributing tutorials on audio content production or application development for mobile devices.

For more information, visit www.sonify.org or contact Hayden Porter Editor, hayden(at)sonify.org, or Tony DeYoung, Site Manager, tony(at)sonify.org.

[mmdev]

I did some research on midi sound effects for mobile a few months ago and couldn't come up with anything.

Do you know of a good online resource where I can
purchase or download midi sounds?

I'm particularly interested in special effects (1-5
seconds), navigation sounds, background loops/music.

I'm trying to use them for a mobile phone project and while I can find plenty of midi songs, it's been very difficult to find sound effects or background loops.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Thanks,
Nader Nejat // Multimedia Consultant + Developer
OmegaMedia // http://www.omegamedia.com
"We help people take advantage of interactive media"

[hp3]

Places to find MIDI based sound effects and loops, that is a good question.

Here are some things to consider, that may shed light on why you did not find sites dedicated to loops and SFX.

1) The MIDI specification, on its own does, not have a way to loop, though the MMA (MIDI Manufactures Association) is working on a extension for this feature. Of course you could duplicate the song within the MIDI file but this would increase the file size and have a limited duration.

MFi and SMAF, being proprietary formats, do have a way to loop MIDI data stored inside the format. So theoretically you can use a MIDI loop within MFi and SMAF for the Japanese FlashLite phone market.

Unfortunately, Macromedia has only chosen to support encoding of MIDI, as a device audio format, for the Symbian FlashLite market. So there would appear to be no way to have MIDI based loop tracks for this device family. Most of the Symbian devices also support RMF which is a midi+audio format like MFi and SMAF and also can support MIDI based looping. For some reason MM did not enable Flash MX to encode this format into SWF. Or atleast I've heard no mention of it.

2) It is certainly possible to develop MIDI based sound effects. The way to achieve a MIDI based sound effect is to sequence and mix sounds that are part of the GM (General MIDI Specification) banks which are supported by all standardized synthesizers. These would be sounds already built into the host synthesizer. The MIDI file would simply be instructions on how to sequence and mix these built-in sounds. The percussion bank of GM has a number of effect like sounds. You could certainly emulate gun fire sounds with percussion effects and maybe explosions too.

One problem though, as you may already know, is that MIDI does not determine the tone quality of a sound. Tone quality is a result of the host synthesizer. Different devices use different synthesizers or atleast may have a different set of samples used to generate tones. Therefore MIDI can sound different on different phones. This is the biggest problem with MIDI as a media format. For mobile devices many phone manufacturers opt for a subset of the GM bank to decrease the RAM footprint of the device synthesizer, so there is no guarantee that all phones support the complete sound set specified by GM.

An analogy is the use of device fonts. The rendering of glyphs are different for different devices. So the text may appear differently, have different line lengths, character spacing etc.

I think that the series 60 and UIQ symbian phones, which are the devices intended for FlashLite, do have a fairly complete support for GM. The Japanese phones upporting FlashLite use chipsets and should have a complete GM bank. So maybe this last issue is not so important for the Flash based devices.

I would suggest that you develop some connnections with Ringtone developers or if you are so inclined, you might get a MIDI sequencer that can interface with your desktop computers sound card synthesizer or QuickTime synthesizer (pretty standard these days) and experiment with creating MIDI based sfx design. You can create an MIDI file, transfer it to your phone as a ringtone and audition the sfx to fine tune the sequence and mix of the device's built in syntehsizer sounds. MIDI sequencing is an intuitive process and is not unlike working with the Flash timeline and layers.

I think there are a lot of creative ways to use the format. I guess it is just another topic to tackle for mobile media production.

I'll try to find a GM bank instrument list for your reference.

[hp3]

well that ended up being a long answer. sorry for the book length response.

If you have access to a target phone and have a clear idea of the types of sound effects you want, I may be able to help produce the midi files.

[hp3]

another thing to consider is that device audio components may only be able to play one sound file at a time.

This could be a problem if your goal is to have both backing music and forground UI sounds playing simultaneously. For example a backing loop that plays while sounds from user interface or alerts play too.

The imode FlashLite CDK states that these phones can only play one sound at a time. Playing a new sound stops the old one to start the new.

I suspect this is true for KDDI phones, but not sure about the Symbian phones.

I would also be interesting to know if symbian FlashLite's built-in audio can support multi wav/mp3 mixing like the desktop PC Flash player can.

[hp3]

Here is a good organization of the standard 128 sounds in the GM instrument list with a link to another table for the GM percussion bank.

http://midistudio.com/Help/GMSpecs_Patches.htm

[Paul Lamonby]

Hi Nader,

I found this link while I too was looking for midi files for a project: www.midicreator.net

Its a bit boring, but at least you can create your own midi sounds and download them. I just used it for a series of notes for button events.

Paul