ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook

Chapter 15. Programming Sound

Introduction

Proper use of sound in an application, game, or web site can greatly enhance the user’s experience. In the Flash IDE, you can import sound into the library, put sound on timeline frames, attach sounds to movie clips, and so on. This chapter covers programming sound with ActionScript 3.0, using the Sound class and its related classes.

The Sound class is set up to load and stream external MP3 sound files. Since the files aren’t embedded in the .swf and are being loaded from an external URL, the domain security restrictions outlined in Chapter 3 apply.

Classes covered in this chapter include:

• Sound

• SoundChannel

• SoundLoaderContext

• SoundMixer

• SoundTransform

These are all part of the flash.media package, so as your first order of business, make sure that you import flash.media.Sound in each example as well as any of the other classes the example uses.

Creating a Sound Object and Loading a Sound

Problem

You want to load into your .swf and have it available to the application.

Solution

Create a Sound object and load an external sound file into it.

Discussion

Creating a Sound object is as easy as making an instance of any class. First, though, make sure the Sound class is imported:

import flash.media.Sound;

and then just create an instance of the Sound class:

_sound = new Sound();

Now of course, you need to give it a sound file to play. As mentioned earlier, this will be an external MP3 file, such as a song. For all of the examples in this chapter, it’s assumed that ...