Adding Sound - Page 2

Introduction
Sound adds another dimension to your movie and is a tool used to communicate emotion. Just take a look at some of the sites featured in Flashkit recently and see how each one makes you feel. In this tutorial we will be investigating how you can add sound to your movie which can play continually, free from the constraints of your timeline. Alternatively sounds can be synchronised with your animation and interaction. For example a popular method of employing sounds is on buttons where sound is used to help indicate to your visitor that he/she has clicked it like in the example above.

The art of combining sounds applies very much to Flash. A poorly mixed movie instantly lowers the quality of the movie the same way Billy Crystal would if he was placed in the lead role of the next Terminator movie.

There are two types of sounds in Flash, stream sounds and event sounds. Streaming sounds synchronise to the timeline and start playing when enough data has been downloaded. This make it ideal for playing on a website. An event sound is different insofar as it must completely download before it starts playing. The sound must also be actively stopped.