There has been another Audiotool project that has gotten our attention lately. rnzr has released five tracks to date, all beautifully made and all covering a wide musical range.

Thank you for being part of the Audiotool community and for all your submissions. Where and what is rnzr in real life? 

No problem, I love being a part of the Audiotool community. I live in Darmstadt/Germany and I work as freelancer and I create (depending on the job) graphics, motion graphics and a little bit of web-development. When I’m done working I am a dancer, DJ, musician and everyones favourite party-guy. I guess that sums it up pretty nicely.

But what about you Andre? I think everyone should revere the guy whose name shows up first on the Audiotool splash screen.

My name starts with an A. Reason enough to be the listed first on the splash screen. However in the time since our 1.0 release in March I feel really proud to see what people are doing with Audiotool. Especially the teeth track of yours, which is a quantum jump in Audiotool sound design and arrangment. I always dream’t of having users like you on board that help us to push Audiotool further. What was you initial experience with Audiotool? You are allowed to be very critical!

My very first experience was some years ago, when it was just called Noxtools (I think) and only offered the clones of the famous Roland machines. Already then I was impressed by the power and the good sound it offered but since I’m a timeline guy rather than a pattern guy, I closed it and checked back in June this year. I was astonished to find that everything was there, timeline, effects, samples, simple to use routing options and a new, great sounding synth. Everything felt so familiar and sometimes even more clever than other DAWs I had used. So I sat down for a couple of minutes and started my very first tune. It was nothing special (pyjama tango) but I thought to myself “yeah, I will dig deeper into Audiotool tomorrow and create more”. Also a great achievment for myself was that I instantly started arranging. I was stuck with ‘loop-only’ arrangements for years. I think its because of the community and the the good will of people to help, share or just comment on productions that got me arranging with Audiotool. Also the possibility to work almost anywhere on your tracks is just brilliant and highly motivating.

I know exactly what you mean. I have hundreds of Reason loops and I will never touch them again. Very good to see that Audiotool motivates you to go further. How long did it take to create your track teeth?

Thanks for the fish! teeth is the most complex track I have made so far on Audiotool. I think it took like 8 hours pure work, but that’s just a guess. Often I work very stupidly, I open up a draft, listen for a few minutes to what I did unsober the night before and then close it again, so its difficult to say how long it really took. As far as my draft history shows it was dead until the arrival of Rasselbock which was essential in creating the bassline.

Ok, now for some criticism. Audiotool crashed very, very often while I was finishing teeth. It was the first time I saw the ‘recovery’ message and it happened a couple of times thereafter. I was already pretty far into the arrangment and when I wanted to copy a whole bunch of blocks and it just crashed. Another problem with the track was that I used like one million effect devices and my computer was just too slow but after buying a faster computer everything went back to normal. Now the only problem with teeth is that I can’t open it anymore, because you know, it’s weird! What do you think, are you able to achieve more power and stability in the future or has Flash already been used to its max? 

Why didn’t you send us a bug report? We love to get this kind of information so we can fix stuff. Considering teeth as one of the biggest arrangements I have seen so far Im not surprised it crashed, since you would have encountered scenarios that have not yet been tested. The loading bug however is already fixed internally. After the next update you will be able to load teeth again. In terms of performance, there is a lot of stuff we still could do and a lot of stuff Adobe could do. The problem is that the stuff we could do will make our code more ugly and harder to maintain. So we always try to provide the best performance without loosing the option to quickly implement new features and we know that Adobe is doing the same. I think in the end we will all be happy.

So well, it is never always good to get a bug report in an interview but isn’t there anything conceptional you don’t like about Audiotool? In other words, what should we focus on?

You’ll laugh, I searched for the feedback form but I couldn’t find one. Public bug reporting on facebook is not my cup of tea and the forum on yourvoice.com looked more like a feature wish-list with some fun ideas (disable audiotool when a user is producing trance music). Where should I go for bug reports in the future?

Conceptional? Good question! At the moment I’m really happy with what it is: A portable, affordable and great sounding studio and I’m sure, most of the devices I can imagine are already in the works. Ok, one thing that does annoys me is the file-handling, why is it not possible to save multiple drafts from the same project? My template folder looks really messy. What I’d really love to see, is a much stronger social component. Not just the common friend/followers/like thing, but composing together, taking part in small and maybe time-limited competitons where people can supply their own sample packs for use within the competition entries. I also see Audiotool as a great way to teach people music producing. Maybe even open sessions where beginners can observe somebody creating a track. Or why not go in the direction of those guitar hero videogames? They are getting more and more advanced all the time and with the new keyboard add on for example, they are actually teaching people to play the piano. So I see nothing wrong about giving Audiotool a videogame component too, which would be by the way, very motivating for beginners. People want to be tricked into get work done! Oh, what have you done, I drifted off and gave away some free ideas. All in all a much stronger social component would be great, but, hehe, a sampler with own samples would be even greater! It’s always about the future but what was before the first working version of Audiotool? I read you’re just 12 years into flash coding, impressive! How did the idea shape up and were you the main inventor of it?

We read everything in yourvoice and its definitely the place to go if you encounter bugs or want to get rid of any annoying behaviours. We will discuss them and where needed create solutions, which is in your case a ‘Save As’ button, right?

And yeah, I do agree that stronger social components are the next big things to do in Audiotool. Some of the best tracks are only listened to on Facebook but get lost on the actual Audiotool site. We are already working on stuff like that. We want to give artists more ways to attract their audience. 

My projects before Audiotool were pretty random. At first I didn’t think I could program anything. Audio was out of my league in terms of what I could do with Flash. That changed with the ‘flash-audio-hack’ I developed around 2006, which was the first time I was able to create a waveform of any shape. I was fascinated and learn’t quickly while working with Bram De Jong (music-dsp.org) on Splicemusic.com (Early music sequencer in Flash) in Barcelona. Unfortunately the project died 2007 but I still wanted to emulate a TB-303 in Flash, just because the 303 reminded me of the endless fun I had in the early nighties. So I started emulating a TR-909, which got a lot of attention and eventually brought me to Hobnox, where I was able to build-up a great team and create the most crazy thing to be done in Flash - Audiotool.

To be honest I didn’t think we would make it this far. When you say your tracks drain a lot of performance I still smile, I couldn’t even imagine running more than four devices simultaneously in Actionscript back then.

We both know that Audiotool still lacks stronger social components, let me test how familiar you are with the community. What are your favourite tracks and who are your favourite artists on Audiotool?

Quite a career there! Congratulations and full respect. Its hard to keep up but at the moment my absolute favourite would have to be Jonjon. Especially his songs Wormhole and Eye Phone they are totally up my street. Wormhole is a total clubkiller. Played that out some weeks ago and the crowd totally dug it. Eye Phone is a great liquid tune and sounds so damn professional, more like the stuff you would buy on vinyl from your uk-dealer. Every time his name flashes up on the list I get super excited. In my opinion he is one of the best arrangers out there on Audiotool. Another artist I really enjoy is nowai, he puts so much out and he always uses the tools in a really creative way. Sure, maybe he lacks some patience in terms of arrangments and sound design, but I’m sure he will get huge if he keeps himself motivated. Go for it nowai!

All you guys involved in developing Audiotool are great composers too, don’t forget that. Joa Ebert’s Faxing Bielefeld was the first song I heard on Audiotool that made me totally speechless and motivated me to go on and try to get out more sound out of the devices. I always loved the original but Joa’s version is great never the less.

Big up to the graphics artist(s) too. Every device looks just delicious and the whole colour scheme is more than pleasing. You got any recommendations for me? I guess I have missed a lot of good tunes.

Heres some of my favourites at the moment: 

Noraus / 808chunk / Sandburgen / dcturner
Versus / Btwean / koala / Yas / virtuousduck
cuppytea / clad07 / dabrig / nico3 / Gear-Head
syncdrifters…

I guess my day at work is saved now, thanks. Got one more question for you: On Audiotool’s Soundcloud I read about the upcoming ‘Audiotool Mashup dJ’ app. Would you share some information like features or release date? 

I cannot talk about it yet but I will say that having all track’s bpm values stored in the database leads naturally to a couple of very nice things we can do. One is the perfect synchronising of tracks automatically, which is for a lot of people is the most difficult part when it comes to DJ-ing. Other DJ softwares are dependant on heavy beat-detecting algorithms, which never work perfectly. I work a lot with Scratch Live from Serato but it would be nicer if I could focus entirely on transitions and effects. What are you using when DJ-ing? Have you seen this?

Yeah, I’ve seen it. It looks beautiful but since I went fully digital I don’t really see the point in stuff like that. I think haptic control is really important, especially to keep the connection to the audience, with touch-only devices it’s tricky to not mess it up when not looking at the screen. Especially if you do things with 2 or 3 fingers at the same time. For a-b mixing I would still pick Serato over a touch-only solution.

For my gigs I use Ableton Live but I consider myself more as a musician than a classic DJ. I rearrange tracks, mash a lot and do some live remixing as well, for these purposes its perfect. Sure, it has it flaws, especially if you play songs with huge tempo differences. Another big plus for Ableton Live is that you can set it up and use it as and when you want it. Heres a short excerpt from 2006.

Yes, I need to feel things too and I hate fingerprints on polished screens. I guess it will take some time until scientists are able to shape material in runtime. That is the next big thing! I personally don’t like touch at all even if it is better than the good old mouse. Nice mix, only next time leave out the vocals. Humour and good music do not fit! Anyway, thanks for doing this interview. I am looking forward to your next tracks in Audiotool! 

Thanks for the talk, it was a pleasure and has made me more curious about how Audiotool will develop in the near future. keep it up! one last thing, I would love to have a sample in audiotool where Luke says ‘Rasselbock’.

Luke says will do!