MetaSynth looks pretty amazing, Jean-François. I’ll probably get the demo and tease myself a bit when I have the time. For further exploration there’s an article that describes eight apps that convert imagery to sound (excluding Photosounder which might not have released yet) called Say it With Pictures on emusician.com.

As for the comparison with AudioPaint, while AudioPaint surely is a nice program, it differs from Photosounder in many ways. First of them is the synthesis technique. AudioPaint uses sine synthesis, and, while it makes nice crystal clear sounds on a few chosen very dark images, you don’t want to use that to synthesise your vacation photos. Photosounder uses noise synthesis because it’s a better general purpose technique.

Also an often overlooked aspect of Photosounder is that it also opens audio, and as such is also an audio editor of sorts.

You might be interested in the works done by Nicolas Fournel, who developped the same kind of applets… the interface does not look as nice, but functionality is apparently the same.

http://www.nicolasfournel.com/