MACROMEDIA FLASH  MX 2004

Alejandra Jarabo
MAT 116-0081
Media Arts & Technologies division. Santa Barbara City College
INCORPORATING SOUND

SOUND FILES IN FLASH

It is a good idea to import the sound files to Flash project alreadey converted into mp3 format.
This way you will be reducing the file-size of your "fla" file.

Remember that Flash can compress an audio file as mp3 on its way out to a swf file (if you imported a AIFF or Wav file).
We are trying to perform the operation ahead so your "fla" file gets smaller.
(Remember that you are sending Fla files though Vista as assignments)

AIFF and WAV files are uncompressed audio files, so they are going to be logically bigger than the mp3 equivalent.

The MP3 format is a compression system for music that helps reduce the number of bytes in a song without hurting the quality of the song's sound.
Using mp3 lets you shrink down the original sound data from a CD by a factor of 12, without losing sound quality. So, an audio track that is 48-megabytes (MB) can be compressed down to about 4 MB.

 

As any compressed format, there has been some quality loss in an mp3 file compared to an uncompressed sound.
The mp3 algorithm uses a technique called "perceptual noise shaping", that tries to imitate the human-hearing, getting rid of sounds that fall out of our hearing range and giving priority of those that we can hear better (If there are two sounds playing simultaneously, we hear the louder one but cannot hear the softer one).
Using facts like these, certain parts of a song can be eliminated without significantly hurting the quality of the song for the listener.
   
COMPRESSING A SOUND iN MP3 FORMAT

Mp3 is a short version for MPEG audio-layer 3 file.

You can use "AUDACITY" ( a shareware sound editor) to edit and convert to mp3 your sound file.

You can download Audacity from:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/mac

You will see the link for windows from that page.
Remember to download the Lame mp3 encoder to be able to encode mp3s from Audacity.
COMPRESSING A SOUND IN MP3 format with Itunes
You can use Itunes to convert a sound file into mp3.
see the Animated gif on how to do it (you can download the animated gif to your computer).

TO SEE THE SIZE AND FORMAT INFO IN ITUNES
When you first import the sound file, it might get buried in the Library list ( if you also use ITunes to organize music in your computer).
If you do a search for the new sound file, you will see it isolated like in the graphic below)