Flash sound quality

[Brian Galt]

I'm new to Flash and the sound from demo movies and my own creations sounds horrible. Choppy, scratchy, really bad. I know my .wavs are OK. System: SBLive card, Win98, PIII450 w/ 128 ram and decent speakers. Any suggestions?
Thanks

[Rick]

Yeah,

When you export your .swf movie the sound is compressed...

You can change the settings in: File --> publish settings -->flash

Note that better sound quality increases your final movie heavily!!!

Greetz,
Rick

[Storm]

Hello Brian,

The compression used by Macromedia is very unforgiving to sounds which are not optimally produced. Are you making your own sounds and music? Where is the audio coming from?

Try exporting your Flash movie at different export settings. Firstly, try exporting your RAW audio file at 44.1 kHz (or whatever sample rate your original sound was). Then try different Mp3 and ADPCM settings. You will find each setting will change the quality of your sound immensely. If this is the problem, then your sound file has noise in it and that noise is exagerated upon export.

Another thing about audio is that a WAV file can exist with different CODECs (meaning compression methods). Some of these files can't be read on Macs, and some can't be used properly in Flash.

I hope this helps, but audio is such a HUGE area and your problem doesn't get very specific.

Cheers

[stewart]

You know I think I have the answer to this for you. (It's that SBLive card, IMHO.)

Now what I am about to tell you sounds a little odd, yet it works to clear the sound up.

Like I said, I noticed you said you have the "SBLive card." I have that too, and have the same similar problem you described with the sound from Flash. Play any Flash 4 file, whatever it is, and it sounds broken up and crappy.
However, I have discovered a way to clear this up (works for me), and it will sound cleaner and clearer. This is an odd thing, and something buggy for sure in the way this works, yet it DOES work.

Here's what I do as soon as a Flash movie starts to play, and must be playing sound at the same time, I will mouse over (do not click) over the "Minimize" or "Close" buttons up in the upper right hand corner of the browser
window, wait for awhile (holding the mouse steady) while waiting for those yellow "Minimize" & "Close" mouse over labels to appear. When they do, I remove the mouse cursor away from them anywhere, and wallah! The sound comes
through clean and clear! This is not a permanent fix though, it has to be done every single you load and play a new Flash file. - Another quick fix also is to click the "Minimize" button on the browser window, while a new Flash
file and sound are playing which you just loaded into the browser, then go to the taskbar, and click the browser window you just minimized and bring it back up again. Wallah, that works also. Clears the sound up.

I think all of this is obviously a lot of screwy stuff to get the sound to play correctly all the time. Not sure who blame for this though. The Creative Sound Blaster card people, or the Macromedia Flash people. Hopefully
someone will look into this and fix it, cause it's a real genuine pain to do this all the time to get the sound working correctly in Flash.