Sound and ActionScript

With ActionScript®, you can control sounds at runtime. Using ActionScript allows you to create interaction and other capabilities in your FLA files that is not possible with the Timeline alone.

AS3 Developer’s Guide: Working with Sound describes how to work with sound in ActionScript 3.0.

 (Animate only) ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 1.0 are not supported with Animate.

Using sound behaviors, prewritten ActionScript 2.0, you can add sounds to your document and control sound playback. Adding a sound using these behaviors creates an instance of the sound, which is then used to control the sound.

 ActionScript 3.0 and Flash Lite 1.x and Flash Lite 2.x do not support behaviors.

Load a sound to a file using a behavior

Play or stop sounds using a behavior

Control sounds with the ActionScript 2.0 Sound object

Use the Sound object in ActionScript 2.0 to add sounds to a document and to control sound objects in a document, including adjusting the volume or the right and left balance while a sound plays. For more information, see Creating sound controls in Learning ActionScript 2.0 in Flash.

About the ActionScript 2.0 onSoundComplete event

The onSoundComplete event of the ActionScript 2.0 Sound object lets you trigger an event in a Animate application based on completing an attached sound file. The Sound object is a built-in object that lets you control sounds in a Animate application. For more information, see Sound in the ActionScript 2.0 Language Reference. The onSoundComplete event of a Sound object is invoked automatically when the attached sound file finishes playing. If the sound is looped a specified number of times, the event is triggered when the sound finishes looping.

The Sound object has two properties that you can use with the onSoundComplete event. The duration property is a read-only property representing the duration, in milliseconds, of the sound sample attached to the sound object. The position property is a read-only property representing the number of milliseconds the sound has been playing in each loop.

The onSoundComplete event lets you manipulate sounds in a many ways, such as the following:

• Creating a dynamic playlist or sequencer

• Creating a multimedia presentation that checks for narration completion before advancing to the next frame or scene

• Building a game that synchronizes sounds to particular events or scenes and transitions smoothly between different sounds

• Timing an image change to a sound—for example, changing an image when a sound is halfway through at playback time

Accessing ID3 properties in mp3 files with Flash Player

Macromedia Flash Player 7 from Adobe and later supports ID3 v2.4 and v2.4 tags. With this version, when you load an mp3 sound using the ActionScript 2.0 attachSound() or loadSound() method, the ID3 tag properties are available at the beginning of the sound data stream. The onID3 event executes when the ID3 data is initialized.

Flash Player 6 (6.0.40.0) and later supports mp3 files with ID3 v1.0 and v1.1 tags. With ID3 v1.0 and v1.1 tags, the properties are available at the end of the data stream. If a sound does not contain an ID3v1 tag, the ID3 properties are undefined. Users must have Flash Player 6 (6.0.40.0) or later for the ID3 properties to function.

For more information on using the ID3 properties, see id3 (Sound.id3 property) in the ActionScript 2.0 Language Reference.