• What is the AmplitudePro Xtra?
• Amplitude and AmplitudePro Xtras
• What's new in version 2
• Director 11.5 compatibility

What is the AmplitudePro Xtra?

The AmplitudePro Xtra 2 allows Adobe Director™ movies to respond in synchronization with spectrum and amplitude data derived from Director sound cast members. Spectrum data is a representation of the relative power of frequency bands in the sound over time and amplitude data is a representation of the relative overall loudness of the sound over time - in other words, it represents the waveform of the sound.

The xtra works by scanning a Director sound cast member to generate a complete representation of the frequency spectrum and/or waveform of the sound, it then sends a continuous stream of values to Director projectors and Shockwave in sync with the sound as it plays.

This means that, with spectrum values, you can,

• create visualizations of sound cast members using normal Director sprites or imaging Lingo
• synchronize animations to frequency values
• create graphical EQ displays
• respond to frequency values either graphically or interactively, as a sound is playing

And with amplitude values you can,

• synchronize sprite animations and properties to sounds in Director
• draw sound waveforms in synch with a sound as it plays using normal Director sprites, or draw the complete waveform for the sound before it plays
• achieve lip-sync between animated characters and spoken dialogue
• change inks and blend properties in time with sound and music
• create sound visualizations based on amplitude intensity using Imaging Lingo or Shockwave 3D.

• works with internal sound cast members (including SWA and MP3)
• works with externally linked WAVE, AIFF, SWA and MP3 files
• works with Director 8 to 11.5 (see Director 11.5 Compatibility)
• is cross-platform (Windows, MacOS X)
• is safe for use with Shockwave
• works with streaming Shockwave audio

The xtra has a number of Lingo functions for setting parameters and receiving data from sound cast members. There are also a number of easily configurable xtra properties, including,

• frequency range - low and high cutoff values
• number of bands used for spectrum data
• optionally select a logarithmic distribution of band ranges
• optionally set custom frequency ranges for all bands
• resolution - determines the number of amplitude data values per second that get sent to Director
• scale - determines the scale used for amplitude values. Can be any value between 1 and 32767.
• smooth data - smoothes amplitude data resulting in less rapid fluctuations between amplitude values which means smoother animations

Amplitude and AmplitudePro Xtras

There are now two editions of the xtra; the standard Amplitude Xtra and the AmplitudePro Xtra. This page deals with the AmplitudePro Xtra.

The standard Amplitude Xtra deals purely with amplitude values. The AmplitudePro Xtra incorporates all the functionality of the standard Amplitude Xtra plus it is able to return spectrum values to Director. If you just need to use amplitude values then see the Amplitude Xtra page for more information.

What's new in version 2

• compatibility with Director 11 and Shockwave 11
• a Universal Binary version of the Macintosh xtra that runs natively on Intel and PPC Macs
• compatibility with Windows Vista
• backwards compatibility with Director 8 - 10.x on both Windows and Macintosh platforms
• enhanced control of amplitude smoothing
• support for sound members using 48KHz sample rate
• support for MP3 files using Variable Bit Rate (VBR) and Joint-Stereo encoding
• enhanced spectrum analysis to improve sensitivity at higher frequencies (above 8kHz)

Bug fixes include:

• invalid data output and occasional crashing when processing unsupported compressed WAVE files.
• incorrect data to be generated when the sound file has many cuepoints
• amplitude dB scale returning -1 for silence in some sound files
• normalize bug resulting in negative values when processing some linked sound files
• invalid data being generated with the resolution property = 1
  

This version of the AmplitudePro Xtra also marks the end of the Macintosh Classic (OS8-9) xtra. A MacOS X Carbon-only version of the xtra is included in the v2.0 package for backwards compatibility with Director/Shockwave 10 and earlier.

Existing users of the xtra can upgrade here.

Director 11.5

See the Director 11.5 Compatility page for details.