There is a sort of self-perpetuating ignorance of digital sound among many multimedia developers (even books on the subject of multimedia glaze over the noisy part of "multi"). The fact is that sound came rather late to the game, and

as a result, imagery has taken precedence and held on. Things are coming around, though, and we can thank the Internet for being the great equalizer.

To this day, as is often the case in our fractured digital domain, standards and formats are somewhat platform specific. Regarding sound editing, you will find even the applications to be platform specific. It's the authoring tools like Director and Flash that bridge the gap. As a result, however, they often compromise functionality to the lowest common denominators.

Flash manages sound but does not capture it. Nor does Flash offer anything but relatively crude tools and generic effects. Adding sound to a Flash animation, therefore, is rather simplistic - there are a few tricks of the trade, but anticipate that real magic has to occur elsewhere.

Note: On the Macintosh, "elsewhere" might likely be Macromedia's Sound Edit 16, which is easy to use and has the ability to import and convert a variety of sound formats. Macromedia's Deck II offers much more control, especially when mixing multiple tracks of sound. In Windows, Sound Forge offers excellent sound shaping controls and effects, but will require you to do the multitracking in Flash.

Regardless of where you choose to edit, at the barest minimum there are three acronyms you will need to know when utilizing sounds within a Flash animation:

	AIFF is the Audio Interchange File Format developed by Apple Computer, Inc. and is therefore the standard sound file format used within the Macintosh OS.
	WAV is the extension for the Waveform Audio File Format originally developed by IBM and Microsoft for the Windows 3.1 environment.
	ADPCM is the compression algorithm also fondly known as Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation. As all sound compression must abbreviate a linear stream of data, it is important to realize that the greater the compression rate, the lesser the sound quality.