Macromedia Flash 8 for Windows & Macintosh

15. Adding Sound

It's amazing how much a classic silent film conveys with just moving pictures and text, but that era is history. Audio is a vital feature of today's Web sites. In Macromedia Flash, you can incorporate sound in your projects, either as an ongoing background element or as a synchronized element that matches a particular piece of actionsay, a slapping sound that accompanies a pair of hands clapping.

To add sound to Flash movies, you must import sound clips to the library and then attach instances of the sound clips to key-frames. You can access sounds and control synchronization of sounds via the Frame Properties tab of the Property inspector.

Flash offers a limited form of sound editing. You can clip the ends off a sound and adjust its volume, but you must do other kinds of sound editing outside Flash. When you publish your finished movie, pay attention to the sampling rate and compression of sounds to balance sound quality with the file size of your finished movie. You learn more about these considerations in Chapter 16.