Flash Sound for Dynamic Sites - Page 9

Fire up Flash and create a new movie. Insert a blank keyframe at frame 1. Double click on that frame and go to the Actions tab. Insert a Stop there.

Import the sounds you will be using in your web site. Remember to import all the sounds for the site since all of them will be contained inside the movie you just created.

Create a new Symbol choosing New Symbol from the Insert menu. In the dialog box that appears, give the symbol the name you want and set Behavior to Movie Clip. When done you will see the timeline for the Movie Clip you just created.

In the Movie Clip’s timeline insert a keyframe at frame one, insert a Stop action in the newly created keyframe.

Insert blank frames at frames two and three.

Insert a keyframe at frame four, double click it and using the Sound tab insert one of your imported sounds. Set the Effect as Custom, Sync as Stream and Loops = 0.

Use the volume envelope as you feel it enhances your sound.

Now add blank frames until you can see the whole soundwave on the timeline, there is no need to add frames beyond the soundwave’s duration.

Now you have your first movie clip. Repeat this process for each sound you want to have inside the movie and when done switch back to the main scene.

Now you should be able to see all the Movie Clips in the Library window. Drag them into the main scene’s frame one.

After dragging a Movie Clip into the Scene, double click it and give it an instance name. The instance name should be one of the names you wrote down in step (a.) complete with uppercase and lowercase letters if appropriate.

Using the names you collected at step (a.), you will make a connection between that link and the Movie Clip, this connection will be used by the JavaScript code to play them.

This is a crucial step, please be careful giving names, if you give the Movie Clip a bad name you won’t be able to play it and will have to go back to the Flash project and change the name.

If two or more links and/or images point to the same page, just drag as many Movie Clip instances as you need inside the scene and give each one the proper name.

After all these steps you should have a one frame scene with many movie clips inside it and each movie clip should have a different name. Keep in mind that the name of the symbol does not need to be related to anything but, the name of the Movie Clip instance should.

After all this work, export the movie with whatever name you want. Please remember that ‘whatever name you want’ really means the same name you employed when embedding the Flash Movie inside the invisible frame.

If you completed the above steps you have a ‘soundbank’ inside the Flash movie that after embedding in a web page is ready to be called and played.

The use of the Stop action inside the first frame of the scene and the first frame of each Movie Clip is to avoid the movie from playing sounds when embedded. The blank frames inside each Movie Clip are meant to avoid clipping (no pun intended) of the first part of the sounds when the Flash Player gets instructed to play the Movie Clip.

After all this work we are only missing the JavaScript code that will act as the glue for all these different components. This is the main subject of the following section.