Electrify Your Site with Scopes!
By Dudette
(July 30, 2000)
If you're not viewing this story on a WebTV, you won't be able to see the audioscopes and you'll probably wonder what we're talking about. "Audioscope" is a special object that is built into the WebTV browser and that displays the waveform on each of the two stereo channels during audio play -- another good reason to use a WebTV!
If you're relatively new to WebTV or are just beginning to build your homepage, you may not have discovered one of the neatest "WebTV-only" tricks that you can use to jazz up your web site -- Audioscopes.
The Audioscope is a visual respresentation of the left and right channels of audio that are playing on a web page or from the WebTV ROM cache. Basically, it's the same as the little box that you see in the lower right corner of the WebTV status bar that pulsates when there's music or audio playing. You can try the music list in the table at right to see how they look with different types of music.
The most basic way to put an audioscope into your web page is simply by using the command <AUDIOSCOPE> The result looks like this:
But this is only the beginning of the things you can do with it. You can set the height and the width, just as you would size a table or image, and you can also set the background color and the colors of the display lines.
Here's a divider bar made with an audioscope, with the background set to black, the right color to green, and the left color to blue. The code looks like this:
<AUDIOSCOPE BGCOLOR=black WIDTH=400 HEIGHT=20 leftcolor=blue rightcolor=green>
If you want to make a greater separation between the left and right lines, you can also add a leftoffset and a rightoffset. Check out the difference in the audioscope below. It's just exactly the same as the one above, except that we added leftoffset=5 and rightoffset=-5 to the AUDIOSCOPE tag:
You can also change the "gain" -- the amount and direction of response to the audio. Here's the same scope as above with the gain set to 10.
And here's the same scope, with the gain set to -10. The lines pulse in the opposite direction.
Now, set the gain to 0, and you'll see something entirely different -- it looks like the graphic display on a stereo! Unfortunately, there's not any way to make the display vertical with the gain at 0.
You can probably imagine a lot of fun uses for the scopes. You can use them as dividers and as buttons, or as a focal point to dress up your webpage. All you need is to have audio playing -- either as bgsound, or as a clickable link -- to make them work.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg in the creative things that you can do! There are many creative audioscopes that have been made by WebTV users, and a whole community that enjoys exploring their creative possibilities. Here are some good places to get started;
Chardonnay's Collection of Audioscopes
Chardonnay has built a truly amazing collection of creative uses of audioscopes.
Chardonnay's Scoop On Scopes
On this site, she gives you a much more extensive scope tutorial than our introduction here, and shows you how to create scope art.
Dale's Scope Trix
Dale is the creator of several amazing audioscopes, and shows you more about creating cool scope art.
Jazzman's Cool Scope Trick
It is cool!
Ms Spiffy's Audioscopes and China Painting Art
More creative scoping by Ms Spiffy.
Worf's Scope School
Worf has broken the basics down into sections -- a good place to start!
Certified Scopes
Thumbnails show you what the scopes look like, even if you're on a PC! Awesome!
How to Make Audioscopes
Leesa shows you the basics.
MadRabbit's Audioscope Builder
A great tool for exploring scopes, from the reclusive rabbit who's one of the WebTV community's greatest toolbuilders.
Fred's Scopes Are Back!
Fred shows you how, and gives you some great links.
alt.discuss.audioscopes
The newsgroup where you'll meet lots of these folks, and find the answers you need (like how to put a scope into your email, too!)
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