Putting sound in Flash - (using button states)

One method to trigger sound in Flash is to insert the sound file directly into one of the four states of a BUTTON. If you need a refresher on buttons in Flash and the four states of a button, please view the buttons tutorial: HERE
We will start our scene with a simple button. Remember that a button has FOUR states, UP, OVER, DOWN, HIT. Our button will be a wasp.

FILE DOWNLOAD (if you want to do this exercise yourself).
To download the button FLA file, it is HERE. To download the WAV sound file, it is HERE.
You will probably need to Right Click on the links and select "Save Target As"

This is our button without any sound attached. By now you should know how to create a button with four states. If not, please revisit the first tutorial here: tutorial

Now we will be using a sound clip of a wasp buzzing. When you use sound clips in Flash, keep the following things in mind:

• Flash prefers WAV, AIFF, or Quicktime audio files. It can do MP3s, though if you are looping sound, using MP3s can be problematic.
• Higher quality sounds work best. When Flash makes a movie, it can recompress any high quality sound file down using its own compression. So for best results, use high qulaity sound.
• Think about the duration of your sound clip. If it will play every time someone mouses over a button, you may not want the sound clip to be too long!

You can import a sound file in the same way that you would import a picutre into flash: either go to FILE>IMPORT>IMPORT TO LIBRARY, or hit CTRL+R, then choose your sound file. Mine in called "wasp_1.wav".

Now you should see your sound file in your library.

NOW is when you should decide how you want your sound file to be triggered. In this method, we will be inserting the sound file directly INSIDE our button (in one of the states), so our two main options would be for our sound to play when the mouse rolls over the button (sound would go in the OVER state), or if the sound plays when the user clicks on the button (sound would go in the DOWN state). Let's choose the latter.

1) Going into Button Editing Mode: To edit the four states of the button, double click on it in the stage. Now choose the DOWN state keyframe (see image):

2) Drag sound file from library to Stage: Now that we are in the right keyframe, we will go to the library and drag the wasp_1.wav file right ontp the stage (where the picture of the wasp is sitting). Once you do this, you will see that the DOWN keyframe in the timeline will have a new wiggly line running horizontally across it - this means that there is a sound file in that frame.

3) Test movie to see (hear) if it works: to test your movie hit CTRL+RETURN (or CONTROL>TEST MOVIE). Then click on the button (thereby activiatin the DOWN state). Here is the result:

4) A couple details. There are two more important factors to this process. The first is making changes to settings for the sound file, the second is to change the settings for how your whole Flash movie will compress sounds when being exported.

Making changes to the specific keyframe. Click once on the keyframe that contains the sound file, in our case the DOWN state of the wasp button, and look in the Properties Inspector. Here are the important parts:

• SOUND DROPDOWN: Under this area you can choose any sound in your library to be played during the keyframe that you have selected. Alternately, here is where you can REMOVE A SOUND, by choosing "none" from this dropdown.
• SYNC DROPDOWN: This is an important feature that determines how Flash plays your sound. If it is set to EVENT, this means once the playhead hits the keyframe with a sound file in it, the ENTIRE sound will play (even if a ten second sound clip is only on ONE keframe). This effectively says: "play the whole sound, regardless of the duration". If the Sync is set to STREAM, then the sound will play only as long as the playhead is playing. This is to say, the sound will only play if you have enough frames in the timeline to accompany it. This is a useful option if you have an animation that you want to sync up with a sound file. In this option, if you PAUSE the animation, then the Sound pauses too (becasue the sound is STREAMING with the animation). This is not the case if you use EVENT sound.
  
  Note that you can also set your sound to LOOP where the box says Repeat.
  
  For our purposes, we want to leave the SYNC option set to EVENT.

Making changes to the whole Flash Movie. Now we will change the sound compression settings for when we export Flash.To do this, go to FILE>PUBLISH SETTINGS. This will bring up this dialog box:

Click on the FLASH tab at the top to get the settings for the Flash movie (see top small red circle). To change teh compression levels for ALL of the sound files of the two Sync type (EVENT AND STREAM), click on the Set button for each. I knew that I was only using the EVENT type of sound in my movie, so I just changed that to 80 kbps (80 kilo bits per second - roughly hald CD quality sound). Chnage the quality/compression to whatever you see fit. If you have many sounds, keep in mind that the less compression (and higher quality) can mean longer download times for your viewer. Now click OK.

That's it for adding a sound to a button state. Don't forget that if you put the sound file in the OVER keyframe instead of the DOWN keyframe, then you would hear the sound when the user hovers over the button. ALSO, note that you could have one sound in the OVER state, and a different sound in the DOWN state! Go crazy!

IF you want to press the above concept further, think about the follwing ideas.

• You can put a MOVIE CLIP inside of a button's state, so if your user either hovers over a button, or clicks down on it, it will play a movie clip!
  An example of this can be found HERE (note that the actionscript is on the gray button, but the sound is inside of the green movie clip)
• You could have a whole series of buttons that covers an image (let's say a Kandinsky painting), and each of those buttons could have NO UP state, effectively making the buttons invisible. BUT, they could still have sounds in the over state, and they would need to have HIT states, so there is a defined hotspot. This is a nice little way to make a "sonic landscape".