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Part V
Including Multimedia Elements
Playing Sound with Flash
F
lash is a solid alternative for playing MP3 audio, whether in the background or through an in-page control-
ler—you can even control it through JavaScript in Dreamweaver. Flash has supported sound from early on
and in recent years has strengthened its MP3 playback mechanism. If you’re working with a Flash designer,
creating an MP3 playback movie is relatively straightforward.
One robust solution for incorporating Flash audio is provided by Hayden Porter with his FlashSound API project
(www.flashsoundapi.com). The FlashSound API is an open source JavaScript library, freely available. The
site contains a range of tutorials and full documentation.
If you’re looking for a drop-in solution, a series of low-cost commercial players are available from WimpyPlayer
(www.wimpyplayer.com). These Flash MP3 players support both PHP and ASP as well as XML playlists.
An embedded player is best inserted using Dreamweaver’s ActiveX object—the embedded player
consists of two ActiveX objects, one for the player control (or controls) and one for the audio file
itself. The separation of content and player makes it easy to link the content to a data source while
maintaining the same control panel.
ActiveX objects can be displayed/played only in Internet Explorer on Windows; Netscape
does not support ActiveX, and it is not supported on th ...