Adding Sounds to Buttons

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Adding Sounds to Buttons

Auditory feedback helps people who view your movie interact with buttons correctly. For buttons that look like real-world buttons, adding a click sound to the Down frame provides a more realistic feel. For more fanciful buttons or ones disguised as part of the scenery of your movie, adding sound to the Over frame lets users know that they've discovered a hot spot.

To enhance buttons with auditory feedback:

1. Open a Flash file containing a button to which you want to add sound.

   (To learn how to create buttons, see Chapter 13.)

2. Open the file's Library window (choose Window > Library), and select the button symbol that you want to modify.

3. From the Options menu, choose Edit.

   Flash opens the button in symbol-editing mode.

4. In the Timeline, add a new layer (click the Add Layer button), and name it Sound.

5. In the Sound layer, select the Over and Down frames, and choose Modify > Frames > Convert to Blank Keyframes (Figure 14.16).

   Figure 14.16. Add a new layer for the sounds in a button, and create keyframes at the points where you plan to assign sounds.

   

6. Using the techniques described in "Adding Sounds to Frames" earlier in this chapter, assign a sound to the Over frame and a different sound to the Down frame. Flash displays as much of the waveform as possible in each frame. When you add sounds to buttons, it makes sense to increase the height of the layer that contains sounds (Figure 14.17).

   Figure 14.17. Flash displays the waveform of the assigned sound in the keyframe. Unlike movie Timelines, button Timelines have no in-between frames that can contain part of the waveform. Increasing the layer height for a button's sound layer enlarges any waveforms in the button's frames, letting you see more detail.

   

7. Return to movie-editing mode.

   Every instance of the button in the movie now has sounds attached.

8. To hear the buttons in action, choose Control > Enable Simple Buttons.

   When you move the pointer over the button, Flash plays the sound that you assigned to the Over frame. When you click the button, you hear the sound that you assigned to the Down frame.

Tip

• The most common frames to use for button feedback are the Over and Down frames, but you can add sounds to any of the button frames. Sounds added to the Up frame play when the pointer rolls out of the active button area. Sounds added to the Hit frame play when you release the mouse button within the active button area.

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