Sound doesn't sync when multiple scenes are used

[shorudan]

Hey Flash dudes,

Normally I can sync sound pretty fine using Stream sounds on the exact frame I want the sound to come out. This will work regardless of what FPS I set the movie to run at. For smoother animation, I always change my FPS to 24 FPS instead of the default 12.

However, I discovered that when I have different scenes within a single movie and my FPS is set higher than the default 12, synchronizing the sounds just wouldn't work! I have to switch the FPS back to 12 in order for the sounds to synchronize, even though I'm using Stream sound....

Is this a bug or is there a way to get around it?

[michelle]

I have had extensive experience & problems with this same situation that you are facing with streaming sound over multiple scenes. In fact, it almost made me go looney! :)

Let's just say there is no solution! -- Believe me, I've gone crazy trying to find a solution.

The ONLY way around this is to avoid using scenes in future.
What you need to do is turn each of your scenes into a Movie Clip and drop 'em in on the first scene in their proper spot on the timeline. You'll probably have to do some frame labeling if things are not working correctly for you.

Then have your soundtrack on it's own .swf! Use the loadMovie action in your main movie...that way it will know to refer to your musicfile.swf !!! Always keep them together; they must be inseparable...kinda like when you have images imported into Quark Xpress.

Good luck to you! Something you may want to try out before you convert all scenes to MCs...something that I did not try myself. Try using the loadMovie action with your external music file before converting all scenes to MCs....see if that works out or not. I am curious to know myself.

By the way...an excellent note for the future. Say you create an animation for a client of yours, right?! Now let's say you see it playing at a particular speed on your computer. Another major limitation with Flash is that the animation can very easily play at a different speed on your client's computer. This is all due to CPU -- it has nothing to do with the way you set your FPS.

A way to basically "freeze" your animation to play the same on everyone's computers to avoid having to do lots of changes for the client or whatever, is to, again, have an external sound file using that loadMovie action...BUT, use a silent sound and set that to stream! If it's a 1 second loop, give it the the number how long your animation plays for. If someone's using a very slow computer it will still keep up...but it will jump frames to catch up w/ the sound.

Hope this info is of great assistance to you!

michelle

[shorudan]

Hi Michelle,

Thanks for the great tips! I think I might have found the solution.

As we both know, it drives us crazy when we have multiple scenes and we still wanna sync sound effects.... but what if we really really wanna keep multiple scenes?

I tried a few methods and found one that seems to work fine. Here's how, let's say I want a sound to go off at a certain frame ACCURATELY. Normally, just plonking a sound set to stream on to that frame won't work once we have multiple scenes, so I created another movie clip, placed the sound INSIDE that movie clip and name it... erm, SOUNDMC, it basically has a keyframe where I set a stream sound as per normal and a stop at the end so that the sound doesn't keep looping.

Now, whenever I want the sound ot appear ACCURATELY onto a frame, I just drag the SOUNDMC onto that frame... it works so far for me and solves the problem of the multiple scenes issue.

GIve it a try! I hope that helps, it's just a minor step to still retain scenes.