Flash MX Audio Player - Page 9

Part 2: Planning our controls

What do we want to end up with? For the "Western Australia: Land and People" exhibition we needed a movie control that we could just drag and drop on any file that had audio in it (we had over 80 files to add controls to, so it had to be quick and simple). This means that everything has to be put in to a single movie so that we can just drag and drop the controls onto our sound. So first up:

1. We needed a movie clip to contain our controls. We called this movie "media-controls".

Within that we needed Play/Pause and Rewind buttons, giving:

2. Play button, "play".
3. Pause button, "pause".
4. Rewind button, "rew".

A slider would be nice, for selecting a point to play from:

5. We wanted a movie clip to contain the slider, "progress-bar".

And the slider should have a Drag button for positioning the playhead:

6. Drag button, "dragger".

The slider should probably also contain a preload or streaming indicator to give some feedback on how much of the sound has been loaded so far:

7. Movie clip to indicate preload, "frames-loaded".

This image shows the slider (on the left) with the dragger and a light grey preload indicator. On the right are the rew, play, and pause buttons. All these elements will be contained in a single movie clip ready for us to drop on to a sound.

That'll do for now. We're going to build and test the controls in test.fla and then, when it all works, we'll rip out the control movie and dump it into a media-controller.fla where we will make it available as a shared resource. That way, we'll be able to use it anywhere.

All right, easy bits first.