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Tom Green

Tom Green

tomontheweb.ca

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Streaming audio with the
    FLVPlayback component
  3. Streaming audio with
    ActionScript 3.0
Created:
9 June 2008
Modified:
12 January 2009
User Level:
Beginner
Products:
Flash Media Server
Flash

Beginner's guide to streaming audio through Flash Media Server 3.5

This is the fifth article in my series covering Adobe Flash Media Server 3.5 for beginners. This particular installment shows you how to stream audio files through FMS 3.5. First I'll give you a quick overview of the audio streaming capabilities of Flash Media Server. Then I'll walk you through several sample applications that show you how to stream audio and control it, both through the new FLVPlayback 2.5 component and through ActionScript 3.0. (The article after this one delves more into streaming video through ActionScript.)

Here are all the articles in the series:

So far in this series, you have dealt with streaming video files. However, there will come a time when someone will ask you to deliver audio through Flash Media Server 3.5.

The first thing you need to know about audio and FMS 3.5 is that it is a completely different game from working with audio using ActionScript 3.0. ActionScript includes a number of Sound classes to manage audio. When it comes to FMS 3.5, those classes play a minor role. The reason is simple: The file is being added to a stream and, as such, the "attachAudio" method from ActionScript 3.0 is, for all intents and purposes, rendered useless.

Flash Media Server 3.5 can stream only three audio formats: Nellymoser, MP3, and ACC. For this tutorial, you really won't be using Nellymoser, which is more for voice than anything else. The new kid on the block is AAC. There are a few "flavors" of this fomat, and Adobe Flash supports AAC+, HE-AAC, AAC v1, and AAC v2. That's the good news. The bad news is that AAC content can be played only through Adobe Flash Player 9,0,115,0 or later. (This makes sense because this was the Flash Player update released in conjunction with the introduction of H.264 playback.)

Note: For a great overview of the AAC format, check out this blog post by my Adobe Developer Connection colleague, Fabio Sonnati: HE-AAC v2: A quick technical overview.

Now that you know what you can use, I'll show you how to actually use it.

Requirements

To follow along with this article, you'll need the following software and files:

Flash Media Development Server 3.5

Flash CS4 Professional

Sample files:

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

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About the author

Tom Green is a professor of interactive multimedia at the Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto, Ontario. He is the author of several best-selling books in the area of Flash and Flash technologies. His latest book is Foundation Flash CS4 for Designers, coauthored with David Stiller, and he updated Foundation Flash CS3 Video with Adam Thomas. Tom has completed DVD videos for Lynda.com and Adobe Systems, and is a partner at Community MX and a regular contributor to Digital-Web.com and Layersmagazine.com. He is also an active member of the Adobe Community Experts Group, speaking at conferences and seminars around the world and contributing regularly to the Adobe Developer Connection in the areas of Flash authoring and video technologies.