Sonoflash – Easily Add Sound To Your Flash Apps
I’m a huge fan of using sound in RIAs. I think that having audio cues is just as important as visual cues and that a click sound, or a subtle noise when you interact with an application makes for a much more usable experience. Unfortunately it can be kind of a pain to add those kinds of sounds to Flash applications. In general you have to go hunt down royalty free sounds and use MP3 files in your application which can add a bit more size to an application than some people want. We made some changes to the sound APIs in Flash Player 10 that let you generate sounds and while I was in Singapore I talked to the guys from Sonoflash who have a really great solution.
You can download a series of libraries from them which are all different soundscapes and have different themes. Add one or more of those SWC files to your application and then you can just call the sounds with some simple ActionScript code. All of the sounds are generated by AS3 an so take up a lot less weight than having to deal with MP3s. It also means you can tweak the sounds on the fly and use the APIs to modify the pitch, frequency, or other variables when you call it. I did a video with them in which they show off some examples and how to use it.
Sonoflash; from Ryan Stewart on Vimeo.
Posted in Flash, Flash Player
September 28th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
can’t view on iPhone. = [
September 28th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
OS X can’t even properly convert the mp4….
September 28th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
This is awesome Ryan. Thanks for showing this. Definitely gotta dig into this.
Even as a designer, having to find sounds for applications and sites is probably the hardest part of the project process. Making sounds easy for designers to tweak and hand over to devs will totally help workflow and hopefully make finding/creating sounds more fun.
September 29th, 2009 at 1:57 am
Antonio…thanks for the interest in our products! Yeah, that is our goal. We want sound to take a bigger role in RIA and want to provide tools for you guys to really get creative with it.
I hope you find it useful!! Please contact us if you have any comments and feedback. We need to know what you guys think
Tons of new sounds coming soon.
September 29th, 2009 at 10:06 am
Fredrik,
I am going to dig into Sonoflash as much as possible tonight. Thanks for creating this!
September 29th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
Antinio…btw, on our website we have a showcase section to show innovative and fun ways to use sound…if you make something you want to show then let us know and we’ll put it up
Thanks, f