ActionScript: The Definitive Guide

Name

_soundbuftime Global Property — length of a streaming sound, in seconds, to preload

Availability

Flash 4 and later

Synopsis

_soundbuftime

Access

Read/write

Description

The _soundbuftime property is an integer specifying the number of seconds of a streamed sound to preload before playing it. The default is 5 seconds.

Flash synchronizes movie playback with streaming sounds to ensure that, say, a cartoon character’s lips match an accompanying sound track. Animations will pause until _soundbuftime seconds of streaming sound are downloaded; therefore, a long setting can cause excessive startup times on slower connections. Because network streaming may be slow or briefly interrupted, a short _soundbuftime setting can cause sound to skip (i.e., if enough sound data wasn’t buffered). The ideal setting will vary from movie to movie based on the complexity of the graphics, the quality settings of the sound, and the bandwidth of the end user’s Internet connection. The default setting (5 seconds) usually works well, but experimentation may be required to find the best setting for individual cases. The streaming buffer time can be changed during playback, but it is a global property and cannot be set separately for individual sounds.

Example

_soundbuftime = 10;  // Buffer 10 seconds of audio