Adobe® Flash® CS4 Professional offers several ways to use sound. Make sounds that play continuously, independent of the Timeline, or use the Timeline to synchronize animation to a sound track. Add sounds to buttons to make them more interactive, and make sounds fade in and out for a more polished sound track.

There are two types of sounds in Flash: event sounds and stream sounds. An event sound must download completely before it begins playing, and it continues playing until explicitly stopped. Stream sounds begin playing as soon as enough data for the first few frames has been downloaded; stream sounds are synchronized to the Timeline for playing on a website.

If you’re creating Flash content for mobile devices, Flash also lets you include device sounds in your published SWF file. Device sounds are encoded in the device’s natively supported audio format, such as MIDI, MFi, or SMAF.

You can use shared libraries to link a sound to multiple documents. You can also use the ActionScript® 2.0 onSoundComplete event or ActionScript® 3.0 soundComplete event to trigger an event based on the completion of a sound.

You can load sounds and control sound playback using prewritten behaviors or media components; the latter also provide a controller for stop, pause, rewind, and so on. You can also use ActionScript 2.0 or 3.0 to load sounds dynamically.

For more information, see attachSound (Sound.attachSound method) and loadSound (Sound.loadSound method)in ActionScript 2.0 Language Reference or Sound class in ActionScript 3.0 Language and Components Reference.

The following video tutorials provide detailed instruction on using sound in Flash.

• Working with sound (2:57)

• Working with Soundbooth and Flash (4:02)

• Layers TV – Episode 74: 3D tools and sound (23:09)

1. Select File > Import > Import To Library.
2. In the Import dialog box, locate and open the desired sound file.

You can import the following sound file formats into Flash:

• ASND (Windows or Macintosh). This is the native sound format of Adobe® Soundbooth™.

• WAV (Windows only)

• AIFF (Macintosh only)

• mp3 (Windows or Macintosh)

  If you have QuickTime® 4 or later installed on your system, you can import these additional sound file formats:

• AIFF (Windows or Macintosh)

• Sound Designer® II (Macintosh only)

• Sound Only QuickTime Movies (Windows or Macintosh)

• Sun AU (Windows or Macintosh)

• System 7 Sounds (Macintosh only)

• WAV (Windows or Macintosh)

1. Import the sound into the library if it has not already been imported.
2. Select Insert > Timeline > Layer.
3. With the new sound layer selected, drag the sound from the Library panel onto the Stage. The sound is added to the current layer.

   You can place multiple sounds on one layer or on layers containing other objects. However, it is recommended that each sound be placed on a separate layer. Each layer acts as a separate sound channel. The sounds on all layers are combined when you play the SWF file.

4. In the Timeline, select the first frame that contains the sound file.
5. Select Window > Properties, and click the arrow in the lower-right corner to expand the Property inspector.
6. In the Property inspector, select the sound file from the Sound pop-up menu.
7. Select an effect option from the Effects pop-up menu:

   None

   Applies no effects to the sound file. Select this option to remove previously applied effects.

   Left Channel/Right Channel

   Plays sound in the left or right channel only.

   Fade Left To Right/Fade Right To Left

   Shifts the sound from one channel to the other.

   Fade In

   Gradually increases the volume of a sound over its duration.

   Fade Out

   Gradually decreases the volume of a sound over its duration.

   Custom

   Lets you create custom in and out points of sound using the Edit Envelope.

8. Select a synchronization option from the Sync pop-up menu:
   Note: If you are placing the sound on a frame other than frame 1 in the main Timeline, select the Stop option.

   Event

   Synchronizes the sound to the occurrence of an event. An event sound, such as a sound that plays when a user clicks a button, plays when its starting keyframe first appears and plays in its entirety, independently of the Timeline, even if the SWF file stops playing. Event sounds are mixed when you play your published SWF file. If an event sound is playing and the sound is instantiated again (for example, by the user clicking the button again), the first instance of the sound continues to play and another instance begins to play simultaneously.

   Start

   The same as Event, except that if the sound is already playing, no new instance of the sound plays.

   Stop

   Silences the specified sound.

   Stream

   Synchronizes the sound for playing on a website. Flash forces animation to keep pace with stream sounds. If Flash can’t draw animation frames quickly enough, it skips frames. Unlike event sounds, stream sounds stop if the SWF file stops playing. Also, a stream sound can never play longer than the length of the frames it occupies. Stream sounds are mixed when you publish your SWF file.

   An example of a stream sound is the voice of a character in an animation that plays in multiple frames.

   Note: If you use an mp3 sound as a stream sound, you must recompress the sound for export. You can export the sound as an mp3 file, with the same compression settings that it had on import.

9. Enter a value for Repeat to specify the number of times the sound should loop, or select Loop to repeat the sound continuously.

   For continuous play, enter a number large enough to play the sound for an extended duration. For example, to loop a 15-second sound for 15 minutes, enter 60. Looping stream sounds is not recommended. If a stream sound is set to loop, frames are added to the file and the file size is increased by the number of times the sound is looped.

10. To test the sound, drag the playhead over the frames containing the sound or use commands in the Controller or the Control menu.

1. Select the button in the Library panel.
2. Select Edit from the Panel menu in the upper-right corner of the panel.
3. In the button’s Timeline, add a layer for sound (Insert > Timeline > Layer).
4. In the sound layer, create a regular or blank keyframe to correspond with the button state to which you want to add a sound (Insert > Timeline > Keyframe or Insert > Timeline > Blank Keyframe).

   For example, to add a sound that plays when you click the button, create a keyframe in the frame labeled Down.

5. Click the keyframe you created.
6. Select Window > Properties.
7. In the Property inspector, select a sound file from the Sound pop-up menu.
8. Select Event from the Sync pop-up menu.

   To associate a different sound with each of the button’s keyframes, create a blank keyframe and add another sound file for each keyframe. You can also use the same sound file and apply a different sound effect for each button keyframe.

1. Add a sound to a document.
2. To synchronize this sound with an event in the scene, select a beginning keyframe that corresponds to the keyframe of the event in the scene. You can select any of the synchronization options.
3. Create a keyframe in the sound layer’s Timeline at the frame where you want the sound to end. A representation of the sound file appears in the Timeline.
4. Select Window > Properties, and click the arrow in the lower-right corner to expand the Property inspector.
5. In the Property inspector, select the same sound from the Sound pop-up menu.
6. Select Stop from the Sync pop-up menu.

   When you play the SWF file, the sound stops playing when it reaches the ending keyframe.

7. To play back the sound, simply move the playhead.

1. Add a sound to a frame, or select a frame that already contains a sound.
2. Select Window > Properties.
3. Click the Edit button on the right side of the Property inspector.
4. Do any of the following:

   • To change the start and end points of a sound, drag the Time In and Time Out controls in the Edit Envelope.

   • To change the sound envelope, drag the envelope handles to change levels at different points in the sound. Envelope lines show the volume of the sound as it plays. To create additional envelope handles (up to eight total), click the envelope lines. To remove an envelope handle, drag it out of the window.

   • To display more or less of the sound in the window, click the Zoom In or Out buttons.

   • To switch the time units between seconds and frames, click the Seconds and Frames buttons.

5. To hear the edited sound, click the Play button.

1. Right-click (Windows) or Ctrl-click (Macintosh) the sound in the Library panel.
2. Choose Edit in Soundbooth from the context menu. The file opens in Soundbooth.
3. Edit the file in Soundbooth.
4. When you are finished, save the file. To save the changes in a non-destructive format, choose the ASND format.

   If you save the file in a different format from the original, you will need to re-import the sound file into Flash.

5. Return to Flash to see the edited version of the sound file in the Library panel.

Adobe® Flash® Lite supports two types of sound: standard Flash sounds, like those used in Flash desktop applications, and device sounds. Flash Lite 1.0 supports device sounds only; Flash Lite 1.1 and 2.x support both standard sounds and device sounds.

Device sounds are stored in the published SWF file in their native audio format (such as MIDI or MFi); during playback, Flash Lite passes the sound data to the device, which decodes and plays the sound. Because you can’t import most device audio formats into Flash, you instead import a proxy sound in a supported format (such as mp3 or AIFF) that is replaced with an external device sound that you specify.

You can use device sounds only as event sounds—you can’t synchronize device sounds with the Timeline as you can with standard sounds.

Flash Lite 1.0 and Flash Lite 1.1 do not support the following features available in the desktop version of Flash® Player:

• The ActionScript Sound object

• Loading of external mp3 files

• The Speech Audio Compression option

For more information, see “Working with Sound, Video, and Images” in Developing Flash Lite 2.x Applications or “Working with Sound” in Developing Flash Lite 1.x Applications.