ACTIONSCRIPT 3 Developer’s Guide en

Chapter 24: Working with sound
Flash Player 9 and later, Adobe AIR 1.0 and later
ActionScript is made for immersive, interactive applications—and one often overlooked element of powerfully
immersive applications is sound. You can add sound effects to a video game, audio feedback to an application user
interface, or even make a program that analyzes mp3 files loaded over the Internet, with sound at the core of the
application.
You can load external audio files and work with audio that’s embedded in a SWF. You can control the audio, create
visual representations of the sound information, and capture sound from a user’s microphone.
More Help topics
flash.media package
flash.events.SampleDataEvent
Basics of working with sound
Flash Player 9 and later, Adobe AIR 1.0 and later
Computers can capture and encode digital audio—computer representation of sound information—and can store it
and retrieve it to play back over speakers. You can play back sound using either Adobe® Flash® Player or Adobe® AIR
and ActionScript.
When sound data is converted to digital form, it has various characteristics, such as the sound’s volume and whether
it is stereo or mono sound. When you play back a sound in ActionScript, you can adjust these characteristics as well—
make the sound louder, or make it seem to be coming from a certain direction, for instance.
Before you can control a sound in ActionScript, you need to have the sound information loaded into Flash Player or
AIR. There are five ways you can get audio data into Flash Player or AIR so that you can work with it using
ActionScript.
Load an external sound file such as an mp3 file into the SWF.
Embed the sound information into the SWF file directly when it’s being created.
Capture audio from a microphone attached to a user’s computer.
Stream audio from a server.
Dynamically generate and play audio.
When you load sound data from an external sound file, you can begin playing back the start of the sound file while the
rest of the sound data is still loading.
Although there are various sound file formats used to encode digital audio, ActionScript 3.0, Flash Player and AIR
support sound files that are stored in the mp3 format. They cannot directly load or play sound files in other formats
like WAV or AIFF.
Last updated 6/6/2012
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