Introduction

Anyone who is learning to develop interactive content for flash would probably agree that interactive sound is the most arcane and poorest documented feature of flash. Heck, even the Macromedia Flash documentation has some erroneous information about sync settings which is duplicated in countless other books on flash. This is unfortunate because flash has just enough flexibility in this area to support compelling interactive sound but the knowledge for doing this is largely "underground".

Even though there is little documentation on the subject, there are many folks out there who, through experimentation, have gleaned an insight to this aspect of flash and often share their knowledge in forums like the We're Here Music and Sound forum. This is where I learned, along with my own experimentation, about the techniques described in this series.

Part 1 of this series focuses on a common technique for preparing flash sound for interactivity. Even though Flash 5 has some new capabilities for interactive sound, it remains important to have backward compatible techniques for offering interactive sound to all versions of the flash player. The "timeline approach" to interactive sound is tried and true and works in every relevant version of the flash player.

Mouse over and off the Flash logo below to hear an example (Flash Javascript control not compatible with Mac IE):

To complete this tutorial you need a basic understanding of the flash authoring application. You should know how to add sound, actionscript and labels to a frame. If you plan to use flash to sonify conventional web sites you should also have some knowledge of the FlashSound Javascript API.

Tutorial Navigation:
Introduction
The "timeline approach" in Conception
Create an Interactive Sound fla
Use Actionscript to Control a "Sound Only" Timeline
Use the FlashSound Javascript API to Control a "Sound Only" Timeline
Summing it Up

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