Hi. I'm Andrew. Audio portal junkie since 2010, supporter since 2017. I always want to improve what I do! I make music, run the NGUAC, post poetry on BBS, and am the all-time #2 audio reviewer. I love this site, and I want to make it the best I can! ^_^
Age 27, Male
Policy Research
Bates College
Wellesley, Massachusetts
Joined on 8/16/12
Posted by TaintedLogic - September 27th, 2017
Newgrounds just SoundCloud-ified the audio portal visualizer.
I have mixed feelings. Personally, I loved the indie vibe of the OLD old visuals, complete with @TheWeebl's timeless badger short, the bubbling soda thing, meandering tunnel animation, etc. But I also get that this is practical and modern and stuff, and few people who joined this site after 2011 care about my wistful bullshit. If Newgrounds is only defined by its past and not its future, it's doomed to fail, etc etc.
Thoughts?
Well, the main reason for the change is because the old visualizer style was Flash-based, and Adobe Flash will be completely phased out by 2020. Everything's being migrated over to HTTPS, so rather than wait until the last minute, Tom's getting a jump on things by switching us over to a new HTML5 audio player now.
Suffice to say, a lot has already changed since the site was initially 100% Flash-based and they need to bring things up to speed. I'm sure it's not particularly fun for them either, but if we want things that actually work in the future, some kind of change is needed.
I'm not sure if this is the final version of the audio player or not yet, but what I'm personally much more concerned about is that loops are no longer gapless. Odds are that the classic badgers and mushrooms will never return, but I loved those old-school visuals, too. For now though, if you want to see the previous visualizations, you can always drop tracks into a playlist. Those haven't changed...at least for now.
Ah...I wasn't aware of the exact reasoning behind the changes! Thanks for your insight. Maybe it's time I start making some playlists...
As Chrono said, it was a necessary change. And from what I've gathered from Fulp's replies on the news post, it's not final either. Just, at the moment, the new user pages are top priority, then the whole audio player page will apparently be getting a new overhaul with a lot of lost features hopefully being able to be brought back with it.
Good to know! I trust Tom and the rest of the staff to be receptive to the desires of the community as much as they can, but it's good to know that we might still have a visualizer going forward. :)
uuh... hoi?
i um
think ...
It's less distracting that way, i always thought that random visual spinny things like windows always would do are kind of like ... imagine someone jiggling keys in front of you ... kinda like that. Plus it's a bit more inviting for animators to use it because it itsn't already claimed by a la evil corporate window's visuals, BUT i can see how they are kind of charming and sometimes fitting and meaningful. What i think would be best is that the author should get to choose whether or not to have these visuals and which to choose if so. That would be a win for everybody. I'd personally keep just the Wave file view as it is today, at least for myself, but that's only because i'm a boring fossil square like that. You know one of those who likes things to be dull unimaginative and organized. I guess if you want as much as possible of everything at the same time it's good to bring it back for everybody but it's too chaotic for my taste when you can't choose anything and stuff spins regardless of what you want.
Please don't take it as an offence to anybody's opinion, just sharing what i sincerely think and hope it will help. If this won't work then please feel free to push this button:
[cyber---puuuuunch]
And i will punch myself, wherever you feel is necessary.
LOL...I'm not going to punch you because you have a different opinion than I do. I'm pretty sure you could just turn the old visualizer off by clicking on it, though. It makes sense to me to put it under the control of the person listening to the song.
Also, I hope they bring back the time scale they had under the old system. It's really convenient for letting people know where in the song I'm talking about when I write reviews.
Does anyone know where I can find those audio visualisers?
I had trouble finding them through Google, but I'm sure someone's uploaded a YouTube video somewhere that shows them. You also might want to check Newgrounds' wikia. @MCarsten also has a screencap of the old spectrum analyzer in this forum thread: https://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1194101
AED4
To be completely honest... I'm not a huge fan of the change.
Visually speaking it is a straight downgrade imo. Just displaying the waveform is boring and it kinda ruins the structural surprise. The visualizers made the AP so much more unique and interesting when comparing to other sites. And you had tons of different visualizers to choose from. And even then if you didn't like seeing visualizers you could switch on the spinning disc. Also the old player fitted the style of NG as whole perfectly, and it was just generally much more detailed
Also they removed the ability to change volume, now you can only mute it.
Honestly speaking I hope that they bring back the ability to switch back the visualizers... Now it looks just SC lite...
TaintedLogic
I totally agree. Hopefully they're just experimenting a little before settling on a long-term solution...maybe that's a bit optimistic, though.