Rock'n'Roll dancing letters in time to midi
Thought this idea would be a good tester for Popfly.
Take my acronym " Snapafun " and have it dance to rock'n'roll music.
A. Is it possible ?
B. Where do I go to get started ?
Basically, a webpage that is alive and in party mode when you first arrive there.
Have access to the mid tune, mamadont.mid, that has a great consistant beat that I could use.
See three steps required here:
1. Get font animated
2. Get animation to match beat speed of tune
3. Get animation and tune in sync. [ This at least is where I see Popfly doing its thing ]
Any ideas anyone ?
Snapafun=SNAP your fingersAnd haveFUN ~ to rock'n'roll music !
Hi!
This sounds like fun. 
Here are my thoughts on each of your steps:
1. Animate objects (like your letters). You would create a display block using XAML that takes your letters as input. Then the block would animate your letters. Take a look at the Magic8Ball block. It does some of what you want.
2. Play the beat. Unfortunately I don't know of any blocks that currently exist that play a beat (or tune). However, you could look at Video Player, which plays videos including sound. If you could come up with a block that plays a beat or tune that would be a good step.
3. Synchronize the two. It sounds like a Combine block that takes your animation as one input and the beat or tune as another input. This is making me wonder if Silverlight / XAML supports including music or sound or plans to do so in the future (if so that would make this step easier to think about).
As I think about this it reminds me of another customer request from a while back: Provide a way to make a slide show with music. Any ideas in this direction would be keen!
--Michael
You bet.
By the way I learned that 1) there is a media object in Silverlight which can be used to play your beat, and 2) Silverlight blocks can run in parallel.
So if you write one block to produce a timed animation and another to play the beat, you can just put them both on a mashup and run both together. It will be interesting to see how this comes out...
--Michael
Thanks for that. Now I really need to find a long wet weekend 'cause that took longer to load than I like. Still, we all need to start out from somewhere.
It's fortunate that I'm able to access the actual beats per minutes tunes in original format use so I need to get the actual 'animation' sorted before I go any further and to that end I'm looking around for options ~ stuff that cannot be rushed 'cause I don't wish to miss the 'better' alternative.
Be patient with me, I'll get there.
My idea at present is that I use musical symbols to spell " Snapafun " then have each 'letter' 'pulse' to the beat at a rate to match the tune. All seems possible here so will stay observant of other projects to hone my thoughts.
