Adobe Flash ActionScript 3.0 for Designers Tutorials
Controlling Audio / Scripting the Jukebox pt. 1
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Flash ActionScript 3.0 for Designers / Controlling Audio / Scripting the Jukebox pt. 1)
Let's now close out the section of the tutorial with a review of our Jukebox and the scripts required to get it working. If you go to the Work Files folder and open the Jukebox underscore Volume underscore Finished and do a Control Test Movie, you can see the end results that we're shooting for. There is four songs, each with buttons and then a volume control consisting of four buttons over here to the left including a mute button. So that's how this operates. You can always add more buttons. You can also combine the volume slider, which I showed you previously, with this Jukebox script to get a hybrid Jukebox. That's a good exercise to go above and beyond and apply some of the scripts that I'll be covering here. So go ahead and open up the Jukebox underscore Volume Start File in your Work Files folder and here you have all of the graphics. You can go ahead and replace the graphics if need be, replace the volume buttons with a volume slider or change the buttons here. Change the song buttons or add more. First thing you'll want to do is label your button instances, which I have not done because you need to remember to do this. This is often where students make mistakes. The high volume button should be named highVol underscore Btn with a capital V for the Vol. That'll match my event listeners that I'll be showing you in the script. And the medium button, its instance name is medVol and the low volume button is going to be very similar. I'm going to go ahead and cut and paste the previous one and this will save me time. It'll also prevent you from making typo mistakes; lowVol underscore Btn with a capital V-o-l. And the mute button is going to be Mute underscore Btn like so. You're now ready to add the script for getting your song buttons to work to play back the music and also to get your volume buttons working. So click on the first frame there of the Actions Layer. Open up the Actions Panel and we're going to first create the sound objects that will load our four audio files and you can write out all four of these variables or just do one at a time. If you're struggling with ActionScript or you tend to be a little bit sloppy, I recommend starting off with just one sound object, one sound button and one volume button to start off with. Check the scripting; make sure that one button is working and then copy and paste and then change various parameters and arguments to get the other buttons working. But first we're going to create sound objects. There are the four sound objects that we're working with: variable, sound colon, Sound capital S on that there. Notice that's the blue label so that's a reserved word. That's a sound object; going to create a new sound. Then we're going to go ahead and create our URL request objects for each sound. So notice if I set up my URL request object, my Song 1 through my Song 4, all very similar equals and new URL request. Here's where you're going to place the path and the name of the sound file that you want to play back. Make sure that it's an MP3 file. In this case I've placed a variety of songs in the Work Files folder. There's an audio folder there so don't forget to place your music files in a folder and if you do, to include the folder in the path name. This is in quotation marks. Notice that it goes green when you do that. So again you can either write out all four URL requests or just do the first one for the first song. Let me go ahead and open up the Actions Panel so we can see the next block of code and that is going to be the loading of the URL request data into the sound object. So we create the sound objects, we create the URL request objects and then we place the URL request object into the sound object because notice that this is blank up here. A little bit abstract but once you do this a few time, it will start to make sense. Again, I'm going to load all four songs or you can just do the first one and test it. We're not quite ready to test this yet because we have to create now our functions for running when the various song buttons are pressed. So the first one is the function for the Song1underscore Btn and there is, let me go ahead and make some space here so we can isolate just that function. We're going to create the Button 1 Press function. It's going to be triggered when I get a mouse event from the event listener. And I'm going to use the sound mixer object in this case to stop any sounds that may be playing if we press the button rapidly more than once just in case someone does that. A little check there and here is really the key line right there. We're going to use the play method Sound 1 Play. These two arguments or parameters right there, the zero means start from the very beginning zero seconds in and then repeat that song twice. Probably more realistic just to play it once but I wanted to remind you about those arguments there for repeatability or how many times to repeat this. Go ahead and set up your event listener as we did down here for the various song buttons. If you want you can just do the first one and then this is a good time to go ahead and test this script to make sure it's working. First song should be working when you press the first button here; this one here, Song 1 or you can go ahead and add the rest of the functions. I'll leave them up here so you can look at them. You might want to stop the movie here. Let me go ahead and open this up too so you can see all of my comments. Be sure to comment each block so you can understand what's going on for later referral. But there's the function for the Button 2 Press, same as the Button 1 Press. I'm just changing the event listener right there. Remember that the function there is being called Button 2 Press right here when the event listener is activated. So by this point this event listener and functions for running the buttons should be quite familiar to you. You've seen this before. There is the Song 3 button and then the Song 4 button like so. Once you've gotten all these functions script, go ahead and do a Control Test on your movie and make sure that each song is in fact playing back. At this point the volume control won't be working. We haven't tested, haven't scripted that yet. Once you get all your functions up, you sound object created, your URL request objects created, your event listeners all set up, each of these four buttons should be working so don't continue on to the volume control if you have any trouble with this part of the scripting. Stop here and troubleshoot what's working. You might even want to erase some of the other functions and some of the other URL requests and sound objects and just start with one button. If you can get one button working, then it's very easy to Copy and Paste and change things around and modify it to get all four buttons working. So let me now move on to the next movie and review the various scripts for the volume control, which is this section of the script here starting with the mute button.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Flash ActionScript 3.0 for Designers |
| Author: | James Gonzalez |
| SKU: | 34060 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-82-3 |
| Release Date: | 2009-11-09 |
| Duration: | 9.5 hrs / 101 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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