Animation+-+Sound+effects+&+more

. . . **Animation - Sound effects & more**

**Useful Free Stuff:**

. **Sound Effects & Music....** . . Royalty free production music on CD and MP3's. Web search over 2200 tracks; then preview or buy individual tracks or a song bundle, or a download. Our CD's have more live instruments, more tracks better production and will make your productions shine. [|www.flyinghands.com] .

Koumis Productions...Not only free sounds, but free 3D objects, music, background pictures and video, too. [] .

Partners in Rhyme...Another collection of free sound effects from a producer of sound effect libraries. []

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Free Bird Sounds Backyard bird sounds for you to download and use [|www.birds.cornell.edu/MacaulayLibrary/search/freesounds.html]

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. **How to Add Sound Effects to Flash Animation:**

**The Sound Of Music**
Do you want to know how to jazz up your animation by adding sound clips, looping them, syncing them and fading them in and out?

The Wave Just as you can create symbols and use them over and over again, Flash allows you to import sound files into the Library and use them at different places in your Flash movie. **You can import sound files in WAV and MP3 format via the File -> Import command**. Once you’ve imported a sound file into your Flash movie, it will show up in the Library. Adding a sound file to your Flash movie is simplicity itself – **create a new layer, select the frame where you would like the sound to begin playing, and drag the sound file from the Library on to the Stage**. A graphical representation of the waveform will appear in the Timeline. Flash allows you to add as many sound files as you like to Flash movie; keep in mind, however, that all these sound files are mixed together when the final movie is played back. It’s also a good idea to **place each sound file on a separate layer**, so that you can easily manipulate the various files in a movie. You can control attributes of the sound clip, or add effects to it via the Window -> Panels -> Sound panel. With the frame containing the sound clip selected, pop open this panel and take a look at the options available. The most important of the various options available is the Sync option – it allows you to specify whether the sound file is synchronized with the rest of the animation or not. To synchronize the sound clip with the different frames of the animation, choose the Stream option. Streamed sounds begin playing while they are downloading, and automatically stop at the end of the movie. If, instead, you’d prefer your sound clip to play throughout the movie independent of the animation, select the Event option. In this case, the sound clip plays independent of the frames in the Timeline, and may continue even after the movie ends. The Event option is most commonly used to link sounds to a Flash event, such as clicking a button. If you’d like the sound clip to play more than once, you can enter a number into the Loop field, and you can also add sound effects like fades and channel shifts using the Effects drop-down menu. Finally, you can stop the sound at a specific point by inserting a keyframe at that point in the sound layer, and selecting Stop from the Sync menu option for that keyframe. Copyright [|Melonfire], 2000. All rights reserved. Edited by Ms Gulia.

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Sound Bites
In case the pre-defined Flash sound effects aren’t quite enough, you can also use Flash’s built-in editing controls to further customize the sound clip. These editing controls are available via the Edit command in the Sound panel. This looks complex, but it’s actually far simpler than it looks. For example, to change the points at which the sound clip starts and stops playing, you simply need to drag the Time In and Time Out controls (the vertical gray bars between the left and right channel waveforms) to the appropriate points. This comes in particularly handy if you have a long sound clip, and only need to use a specific portion of it in your animation clip. You can also change the volume levels for each channel by dragging the "envelope handles" – the hollow boxes you see in each channel – up or down. The greater the height between the two boxes, the higher the volume level, and vice-versa. Flash allows you to create up to eight different pairs of envelope handles for each sound clip.

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Boom!
In addition to playing back sound files as the movie runs, Flash also allows you to play sounds in response to user action. The most common example of this is attaching sound files to Flash buttons, so that a different sound plays depending on button state. Take a look at this example, which demonstrates how you can play a different clip for "hover" and "click" events.

How did I do this? Not too hard, actually – create a Flash button, and add a new layer to the Timeline while in symbol-editing mode. Then simply insert keyframes corresponding to the Up, Over and Down states on this new layer, and drag different sound files from the Library for each state. For example, if you’d like a specific sound to play when the mouse pointer moves over the button, you could insert a new keyframe for the Over state, and drag a sound file on to the Stage for that keyframe. Make sure that you have Event selected for the Sync option on the Sound panel, and try it out. You can add sound effects, and manipulate the sound clip with the editing control, here too. ..

Squeezing It All In
Flash typically exports all the sounds in a movie clip when you publish the movie. As the author of the movie, you have a fair amount of control over the export process, including the ability to set various compression options like sampling rate and quality. All these options are available to you in the Sound Properties dialog box, which you can get to from the Properties shortcut menu that appears when you right-click the sound file in the Library. There are four compression options available: default (default settings), ADPCM, MP3 and raw (no compression). A test button allows you to preview the sound clip with your selected compression settings. Some of the compression options allow you to specify bit rates and quality – remember that higher compression equals smaller files equals lower quality when experimenting with these settings. Copyright [|Melonfire], 2000. All rights reserved. . . . . /