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Communicating with Sound

It is relatively easy to add sound to your Flash movie. You can use small sound effects for things like button clicks, or you can import soundtrack to play in the background of your movie. The most bandwidth efficient way to do this is to download a music loop and have the sound continuous loop throughout the movie. You can even synchronize a sound or vocal track with the visual component of your movie to create a flowing, synchronized presentation.

It is important to understand how digital sound works, so first you should read the chapter on sound in your books. Understanding sample rates can help you get the best combination of quality and compression.

Importing a Sound into Flash:

For our windows machines, the sound you import must be a .wav or .mp3 file.

1. From the File menu choose Import to bring up the Import dialog box. File-->Import

2. Select the sound you wish to import and click Open.

The sound is imported and automatically placed in your movie's library. The sound that is in your library is considered the master version of that sound. Copies of that sound-- which you can use at various points in your movie--are considered instances of that sound. Like all symbols, whenever you update the master version, all instances of it will reflect that change.

Regardless of what you are going to do with your sound, you will only work with instances of it (not the master) which you will place on a keyframe within your timeline. You can only edit a sound instance after you've placed it on the timeline.

Adding Sound to your timeline

Go to Windows->Library to open the library and find your sound. Make a new layer and drag an instance of your sound from the library onto the stage. Remember that a sound must be placed in a keyframe.

 

Editing Sound Instances

  • Will this sound loop, and if so how many times?
  • Does it need to be synchronized to the animation?
  • How loud does the sound need to be?
  • Do you want the sound to play through the left speaker, right speaker or both? Or do you want it to fade from left to right?

You can configure instances of a sound using the Sound Panel. Go to Window->Panels->Sound

Once you've placed an instance of a sound on the timeline, you need to figure out exactly how you want to use it in your presentation. Is it a short sound best suited for an action like a button-click? Is it a section of music that you want to use in the background? Is it a soundtrack that needs to be synchronized to animation?

Sync Type: Event, Start, Stop, and Stream

When you place an instance of a sound on the timeline, you use the Sync options on the Sound panel to configure it. There are two categories of Sync options: event-driven and streamed.

Event driven sound instances are triggered by an action in your movie-- the pressing of a button or the timeline reaching the keyframe where a sound instance is placed.

Streamed sound instances, in contrast, are used strictly for synchronizing a soundtrack with animated elements. If you select streaming for synch, you will be able to "scrub" along the timeline and hear the sound as you move the playhead around the timeline.

Event-driven sound instances: Use for button-click sounds, sound effects, and looped music clips. Be aware of the following:

  • An event driven sound instance must be downloaded completely before it can play. Larger sound files may make the download very long.
  • Once a master sound has been downloaded and used in an event driven instance, it down not need to be downloaded again. All other event driven instances based on the sound have immediate access to the sound's information.
  • Event driven sounds can play from beginning to end, regardless of what's happening around them--even if your movie's timeline stops.
  • An event-driven sound only needs to be inserted into a single frame, regardless of the sounds length.

Streamed sounds: Use for synching sound to motion graphics

  • Use to synchronize to visual elements in your movie, you can do this because you can scrub along the sound in your timeline to hear changes.
  • Only a small portion of the sound file needs to be downloaded before it begins to play--even with large sound files.
  • A streaming sound will only play within the frames on the timeline where it is placed. (If there are no more frames in the layer with the streaming sound, then there is no more sound).

Effect

By clicking the Edit button next to Effect you can fine tune your sound effects. In this window, the top window is the right channel and the bottom window is the left channel. You can adjust panning and sound volume here.

Loops

How many loops should you set your music loop to play? Most of the time, I will choose a very high number 500 or 999 so that the loop will keep playing (but not forever). If your sound is not a music loop and you do not want it to loop then type 0 (to play the sound twice is to loop it once.)

Using Sound with Load Movie