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Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Using Sound with Mobile Phones
  3. Sound Formats in Flash Lite 1.1
  4. Preparing Sounds
  5. Using Bundled Sounds in the Authoring Environment
  6. Summary

Using Sound in Flash Lite 1.1

Sound Formats in Flash Lite 1.1

Flash Lite 1.1 supports MIDI, MFi, SMAF, WAV, and ADPCM sound file formats. This differs from the sound formats Flash supports and affects how you will proceed in authoring your mobile application in Flash.

The best place to start is to understand what sound file formats Flash MX 2004 Professional does and does not support. Flash MX 2004 Professional doesn't natively support all the sound file formats used for mobile devices, including the commonly used MIDI format.

When authoring for mobile devices, you must place a proxy sound in a supported format such as MP3, WAV, or AIFF in the Flash document temporarily. The temporary sound files serve as pointers to the final MIDI files. The conversion from sound file to pointer (or proxy) happens as you publish your Flash Lite movie, as discussed in the following section.

One of the advantages of MIDI sound files is that they can be very small, because MIDI instruments reside on the phone and MIDI files are just the instructions provided to the instruments about the playback of the sounds. A helpful analogy is to consider the old player piano that operated independently of a user. The player piano simply read the paper, which served as its instructions to play the music, much like the MIDI file instructs the mobile device on how to play back the sounds.

File size is critical for mobile phones, because bandwidth often is a very important issue. MIDI files can be extremely lean. MIDI instruments can be very small. MIDI files can just be a few kilobytes and can create some great music depending on the sophistication and MIDI capabilities of the phone.

Another limitation of mobile phones is that they often have small amounts of memory and are therefore incapable of playing back large files. It is common to produce a large file if you are using non-MIDI audio. However, compressed digital non-MIDI audio playback can be processor intensive. This means that a sound you can play on a desktop may play back slowly or even be entirely unusable on a mobile phone.

Different phone manufacturers support different MIDI sound formats. So how do you deal with all these different sound formats when you're unsure of the playback devices? You use Flash Lite Bundler.

Using Flash Lite Bundler is necessary, because different phones support different MIDI formats and Flash isn't doing the playback MIDI. Flash Lite Bundler is a great developer's aid. For example, each DoCoMo phone, which is offered by six manufacturers, reproduces different flavors of MFi. You have two choices:

  • Embed six different kinds of MFi in six different SWF files.
  • Use Flash Lite Bundler and encapsulate six different sounds in a bundled file.

The obvious choice is to use Flash Lite Bundler and embed the SWF files into one comprehensive solution.

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