Flash MX Audio Player - Page 19

Conclusion

In the online exhibition, we really wanted to deliver something that most people just couldn't get from going down to the Western Australian Museum in Perth, Western Australia, and checking out the "Western Australia: Land and People" exhibition in Hackett Hall. It was just fantastic that the curators of the physical exhibition could share their thoughts for the online version. Once all of the commentary was recorded by Darren Mok, we needed a quick and simple procedure for publishing all of the files in the online exhibition. This is it. Well, it's sort of what we used.

In our final implementation of this audio player in the "Western Australia: Land and People" site, we did the usual trick of loading all window, caption, and text elements as early as we could, then when we hit the sound, we used our loader to indicate progress. Because we can put the loader anywhere we like, we can make the best use of the streaming capabilities of Flash MX and just when things start to stall (when it hits the audio) we whack in a loader so that the site visitor still sees something happening. And when the audio is playing we have another progress bar to let them know how far through the sample they are.

The audio player we developed here is more like the video player we developed for the Western Australian Museum. It's a bit more complicated, a lot more flexible, and better for reuse.

Hmm. Video player. I think that will be the next tutorial off the ranks!

See you soon.