Flash Sound for Dynamic Sites - Page 2

Overview

It is not new that a single Flash Movie can be employed to sonify a web site; usually you assign each link and image in a web page a start frame number inside the Flash movie and play the movie from the selected frame in response to a mouse (or keyboard) event. This method involves calling the Flash movie from an event handler and passing the frame number from which you want to start playing.

One caveat of this approach is that whenever you modify the Flash movie to incorporate new sounds or replace or modify existing sounds you might experience that the frame numbers you are referencing from your code are no longer valid and you have to modify your calls. This could be very annoying in big web sites and a huge waste of time.

Our approach is to use Movie Clips inside a Flash movie to store sounds and use scripting for the Flash ActiveX control or Plug-In to start and stop those sounds. Also, these Movie Clips will not be referenced by frame number but instead will be referenced by name and the whole idea is to have a unique name for each movie clip that naturally relates to some attribute in the HTML tags (in this case <A> and <IMG> tags).

In case you have to add sounds or modify the existing sounds, the relationship between the HTML elements and the Movie Clips won’t be broken and you won’t have to worry about frames misplaced.

We think that our approach is more natural than referencing frame numbers and, using attributes from HTML tags eases updates. Also you will see the benefits of storing programming logic inside external code libraries so the amount of modifications to the HTML code is minimal.