Easy Dynamic Sound Control With Resume

Streamed audio is often a wise thing for most situations, but some of you will quickly find it extremely trying if you want any sort of dynamic user control over pacing in your movie. Let's say there's going to be a lot of talking in your film, but there will be no recorded voice work. This could happen for many reasons: perhaps you're trying to recreate the feel of the game's own dialogue event system if it had one, or perhaps you're sick and tired of VAs being prima donnas that never turn in their voice work... ever. Whatever the reason, there will come a time when you find you want to stop the movie without stopping the sound. One could use audio set to "start" here, but there is a way to actually both have your cake and eat it too.

I want you to begin by drawing any stupid shape on the stage in a new layer and then converting it into a movie symbol. The shape doesn't matter, we'll be erasing it from existence shortly. Once your symbol is made, click on it to go inside it. Now, here comes the key element, place your sound file set to stream inside this movie symbol. Next, fix the length of the timeline in the movie to be precisely the length of one loop of the music. Aftewards, get rid of whatever the picture was. Congratulations, you now have an invisible symbol that will indefinitely loop the portion of music you streamed in it. This allows you to endlessly loop music without the downsides of "start", but keeping all the upsides of stream, even if you let the movie remain paused while the readers go over your text. However, with just a modicum of action script, there is now so much more that can be done.

If you give this instance of the symbol a unique name, in this case let's say you called the specific instance musiclooper, you can modify it any time with normal action script commands on the timeline. In fact, the only two you're ever going to need to remember for this to work would be these:

musiclooper.play();
musiclooper.stop();

Why would one want to do this when they could simply start and stop the audio file by creating a blank keyframe on the timeline where the movie symbol is contained? Well, let's say you have text that let's the reader decide when they advance the film, because of this you'll never know where the audio might be when the user reaches an event. Let's say you want some shocking event to temporarily cut out the audio for dramatic effect, but then a few seconds later you want it to pick back up where it left off. If you were using audio to set to "start", or if you were to merely remove the movie symbol from the timeline, the audio - when you brought the music back - would start back at the beginning of the song. HOWEVER, if you use an actionscript stop command in the timeline to dynamically modify a movie symbol, the object will retain its place when you go back to it with the actionscript play command. Suddenly, it can halt and repick back up at precisely the correct place all while allowing the reader to peruse the text infront of them at a speed of their choosing.

This effect has been used in Episodes 16 and 22 of Chrono Trigger Unglued for the purposes of audio. A similar, but slightly different usage, was employed for the dynamic control of animation in Episodes 15 and 19. Notice that despite the fact everyone is constantly bobbing up and down during episode 19's vortex sequence, the bobbing is never interrupted when they change poses when you hit the spacebar to advance the conversation.

Wat

TheCaptainBadAss wrote:Wat

Captain. GO WALK ON A BOARD.

Great tutorial Clovis. I didn't know that. I will try it later when I need it.

Wow, I can't believe I didn't think about the actionscript for that effect. You actually taught me something here.
Does that actionscript apply for both AS2 and AS3?

And for those who have trouble understanding because you have your stupid on.
Basically.
You're putting your audio file into a movie clip symbol, extend the frames to match the length of the audio file. Now you can just drag the movie clip to the stage whenever you want that sound/song to play.

And the neat trick, by giving that movie clip and instance name (to do this just have the movie clip selected, and look down in the properties panel to where it says instance name and name it something) you can control when to stop it (without having to remove it from the stage) and play it again, but the sound continues where you stopped it from, rather than just replaying as it would if you would drag it back to the stage.

Lets say you gave it the instance name musicloop, in the actionscript panel, you'd put
musicloop.stop(); to stop it
and whenever you want it to continue playing, you'd put
musicloop.play();

Hopefully that's easier for your simpletons to understand. Thank clovis for filling your hollow skulls with something.

WOAH! THAT IS AWESOME!! I'm definitely gonna use this! Amazing Tut bro

Useful tutorial. I'll bookmark this so next time I need it or try it out I'll be able to follow.

Congrats on teach Eric a thing or two xD

Eric wrote:Wow, I can't believe I didn't think about the actionscript for that effect. You actually taught me something here.
Does that actionscript apply for both AS2 and AS3?

And for those who have trouble understanding because you have your stupid on.
Basically.
You're putting your audio file into a movie clip symbol, extend the frames to match the length of the audio file. Now you can just drag the movie clip to the stage whenever you want that sound/song to play.

And the neat trick, by giving that movie clip and instance name (to do this just have the movie clip selected, and look down in the properties panel to where it says instance name and name it something) you can control when to stop it (without having to remove it from the stage) and play it again, but the sound continues where you stopped it from, rather than just replaying as it would if you would drag it back to the stage.

Lets say you gave it the instance name musicloop, in the actionscript panel, you'd put
musicloop.stop(); to stop it
and whenever you want it to continue playing, you'd put
musicloop.play();

Hopefully that's easier for your simpletons to understand. Thank clovis for filling your hollow skulls with something.

You're a bad person and you should feel bad.
_____

Now that I actually understand this tutorial, this is actually a pretty cool thing.
Great tut, bro.

lol i thought tut part below the comment was part of your sig >_>

Oh wow Grangran

it had the damn underscore crap, what can i say?

TO ERIC:

I'm pretty sure it'll work in most actionscript, as I've been using that solution since Flash 6 (actually, I still use Flash 6). I hope to write more tutorials in the future, but the trick will be deciding on what to write about. Normally when I try to mentor people on flash I start out with the bare basics to build them up to being able to do something in flash at all, but you already have a large selection of valuable lessons here on all of the basics people could ever need to know... even a few I myself didn't know (I must have been lucky in where I've acquired all of my sound effects from, as I never run into the invalid sampling rate conundrum before). If there's anything I ever did in something people would look to know more about how I did it, I can certainly go out of my way to talk about that.

I might next write a guide about how to do amazing camera control simply without any action script like v-cam (after all, it didn't exist before Flash 7), the only problem with that is many people - and I half joke here - start going into cardiac arrest when they see the phrase, "Life without V-Cam".

I actually don't like using the V-CAM. I need to do a workaround. I hope to see your guide soon : D

well right it, so i can watch people suffer :3

Leo let us know when you find a way around

Flash 6?
That's kind of very primitive, though, since stop/play commands have been the same all throughout actionscripting, i do think it should work.

I use Flash 6 because it's what I got on a student discount back in 2003 when it was relevant to a class I was taking in College. I don't believe in bootlegging, and I can't afford a new fancier shmancier version. Also, at this point I would really need a whole new computer to go along with that newer version. I find that limitations are often a driving force in creativity, it was constantly bumping their heads against the ceilings of those early consoles that forced game makers back then to be so creative back then. That said, it would be nice to have the later versions for the special effects as I also use flash for original artwork... there are days when I really hate the Flash 6 Gradients.

You can still get student discounts for the later versions, or an UPGRADE discount.
As for new comp, what are your specs.

I'm pretty sure one can't get student discounts anymore after they've already graduated from College back in 2006. Also, at the moment I am unfortunately currently inbetween jobs so money is really tight (I was trying to save up for a new computer just before I lost my job). As for my laptop, it is an XP machine with 512 megabytes of ram and a 2ghz processor from before the days of multiple cores... it also has a broken spacebar that makes it attrocious to work with, and the USB ports are pretty much shot also. It's sort of like it's on life-support begging me to just let it die with its dignity in a viking funeral pyre, but I'm still forcing it to march once more into the breach while it still lives as there's still some uses I have for it right now in my penniless state.

I think my favorite part is how it takes it about 20 minutes to completely finish starting up whenever I turn it on. And yes, it has been exhaustively scanned for errors... the real problem has actually been that remaining forever vigilant against viruses eventually forces you to upgrade to versions of software so much newer that they are easily almost more frustrating than actually having a virus that can only be deleted by total wiping your hard-drive.

Damn this sounds like a Lange situation

Clovis15 wrote:I'm pretty sure one can't get student discounts anymore after they've already graduated from College back in 2006. Also, at the moment I am unfortunately currently inbetween jobs so money is really tight (I was trying to save up for a new computer just before I lost my job). As for my laptop, it is an XP machine with 512 megabytes of ram and a 2ghz processor from before the days of multiple cores... it also has a broken spacebar that makes it attrocious to work with, and the USB ports are pretty much shot also. It's sort of like it's on life-support begging me to just let it die with its dignity in a viking funeral pyre, but I'm still forcing it to march once more into the breach while it still lives as there's still some uses I have for it right now in my penniless state.

I think my favorite part is how it takes it about 20 minutes to completely finish starting up whenever I turn it on. And yes, it has been exhaustively scanned for errors... the real problem has actually been that remaining forever vigilant against viruses eventually forces you to upgrade to versions of software so much newer that they are easily almost more frustrating than actually having a virus that can only be deleted by total wiping your hard-drive.

Mr. Lange can help you out with that, he's able to run things well with shittier specs than that. He knows a computer inside and out, when ever he appears i suggest you talk to him.

I'll look into that.

He's short-factor btw, don't know if the name may ring a bell.
And I'm ifureadthisdie.
again, maybe it'll ring a bell.

No bells, sorry.