MACROMEDIA FLASH 8-USING FLASH - Working with Sound

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CHAPTER 12
Working with Sound
Macromedia Flash Basic 8 and Flash Professional 8 offer several ways to use sound. You can
make sounds that play continuously, independent of the Timeline, or you can synchronize
animation to a sound track. You can add sounds to buttons to make them more interactive
and make sounds fade in and out for a more polished sound track.
There are two types of sounds in Flash: event sounds and stream sounds. An event sound
must download completely before it begins playing, and it continues playing until explicitly
stopped. Stream sounds begin playing as soon as enough data for the first few frames has been
downloaded; stream sounds are synchronized to the Timeline for playing on a website.
If you’re creating Flash content for mobile devices, Flash Professional 8 also lets you include
device sounds in your published SWF file. Device sounds are encoded in the device’s natively
supported audio format, such as MIDI, MFi, or SMAF. For more information, see “About
using sounds in Flash Lite” on page 326.
You select compression options to control the quality and size of sounds in exported SWF
files. You can select compression options for individual sounds using the Sound Properties
dialog box or define settings for all sounds in the document in the Publish Settings dialog box.
You can use sounds in shared libraries to link a sound from one library to multiple
documents. For more information, see “Using shared library assets” on page 104. You can also
use the ActionScript
onSoundComplete event to trigger an event based on the completion of a
sound. For more information, see “About the onSoundComplete event” on page 320.
You can use behaviors that are prewritten ActionScript scripts to load and control the
playback of sounds. As with behaviors, the media components contain prewritten
ActionScript scripts to load and control sounds (MP3 sounds only) but also provide a
controller for stop, pause, rewind, and so on. For more information on using the media
components, see “Using the FLVPlayback component (Flash Professional only)” on page 304.
NOTE
You can also use actions to load sounds dynamically. For more information, see
attachSound (Sound.attachSound method) and loadSound (Sound.loadSound method)
in ActionScript 2.0 Language Reference.