Virtual ANS

With all the available technology, making music can be done in an abundance of ways. This doesn’t make conventional methods obsolete, but it’s now possible to even turn a picture into sound. In this regard, Virtual ANS comes as a small, fun tool with which to create sound effects from painting on a canvas, and exporting the sound to an image file.

One thing you notice even before running it is that you don’t have to go through a setup process to make it run, because it’s portable. As a consequence, your system stays clean because it doesn’t interfere with any system registries, and besides this, you can keep in on an USB Flash drive to use on the go.

In terms of visuals, the interface is pretty clean, with all elements, functions, as well as the interactive preview area being fitted with neat effects and high-quality textures. All tools are found in a bottom panel, and you need to be extra careful when triggering one, because corresponding settings and configurations are rather difficult to spot.

The canvas is structured in a 2D plain, with an horizontal plain representing time, while a vertical one is used to show scale and notes. These can be configured from the settings panel and have instant visible effects, both in term of aesthetics, as well as produced sound.

You get to experiment on a default drawing. You can play the tune both forward and backward by pressing dedicated control buttons. A brush tool can be used to draw on the canvas, which directly determines what you hear. A lot of options are available, such as brush style, transparency, shape, and more.

Navigation is pretty simple, with the middle mouse button letting you zoom in and out, and holding down the left mouse button serving as a means of moving around. When you’re done, you can export the visual representation to several popular image formats, as well as the sound itself to WAV.

Bottom line is that you’re sure not to become a popular musician or rockstar when creating sound with Virtual ANS. However, the set of tools at your disposal, as well as the overall editing methods make for a pretty fun experience to create sound effects, or simply find out what something you draw sounds like.