Brajeshwar

It seem to have been there for quite sometime, but as I was looking around for some tips and tricks on audio for flash, I tumbled upon this link at killersound.com about tutorials/tips on audio for flash. It will be a good bookmark for anyone doing Flash development. Out of the many articles, I particularly like the “layering audio in flash“, this particular technique was there in some books I read long back during the hay days of Flash 5.0 but then reading it again have refreshed my memory a bit more on understanding the whole scenario. Well, I used to remember that as “Kicker Layer” technique for audio. A similar situation was raised by some developers during a conference in Juhu, Mumbai, India and I am glad that I was able to explain and refer to this technique as a tip for them. [I remember, I got a T-shirt with MM logo for answering to that querry]

Also look at “the nullsound streaming” technique. Let me put a useful quote from the tutorial, for all those Flash designer who keep asking how to keep up the frame rate and more importantly to sync the audio with your animation.

“The other area where STREAM is useful is switching the Flash player to “absolute framerate keeping” mode. If you don’t use any STREAM sound (or any sounds at all) and set the movie’s framerate to 25 fps it DOESN’T MEAN that the player will play the movie with 25 fps! The actual framerate will depend on many things but mainly on CPU power. The stronger CPU you have the more accurate approximation of the desired framerate you got. This means that if you have an average movie it can perform with 8 - 9 fps on a iPentium 166 MHz processor and with 22 fps on iPentium III 500 MHz. If the theoretical framerate is set to 25 fps it means that the CPU has 1/25 seconds to make all of the calculations neccessary to display a frame. If the CPU is not fast enough it will take say 1/5 sec. per frame to perform these calculations so the practical playback framerate drops to 5 fps. If your animation contains 100 frames ALL of the frames will be played both in theory and in practice, but it will happen in 4 seconds in the theoretical case and in 20 seconds in practice (slowdown effect).”