Developing Android Applications with Adobe AIR

Working with Sounds

Now that your sound files are ready, let’s see how we can use them. All sound-related classes belong to the flash.media package and will be introduced throughout this chapter.

Loading Sounds

The Sound class gets access to the audio information to load the sound file. It is a subclass of the EventDispatcher class.

As discussed before, your sound can be embedded, it can be loaded as an external file from your application assets directory, or it can be downloaded from a remote server. For the latter, advise your audience to use WiFi over 3G for a better experience.

If you try to play a sound that is not loaded, you will get a runtime error. Create a listener to be notified when the loading is complete, and then play your file:

import flash.media.Sound;
import flash.net.URLRequest;
import flash.events.Event;

var sound:Sound = new Sound();
sound.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onLoaded);
var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest("mySound.mp3");
sound.load(request);

// sound fully loaded
function onLoaded(event:Event):void {
    sound.removeEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onLoaded);
    sound.play();
}

You can inform the user that the file has started to load:

sound.addEventListener(Event.OPEN, onOpen);

function onOpen(event:Event):void {
    trace("sound loading");
}

If it is a large file, create a listener to display the progress:

import flash.events.ProgressEvent; sound.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.PROGRESS, onLoading); function onLoading(event:ProgressEvent):void { // display the percentage ...