Flash Tutorials

Making a MP3 player is really simple using Flash and AS2. First open up an FLA in Actionscript 2.0 format. In the first frame, open the actions window and write:

var simple_mp3:Sound = new Sound();
simple_mp3.loadSound( ‘example.mp3’, true );

Here we’re loading the MP3 ‘example.mp3’. The second variable in loadSound() is whether to stream the media. If you would like to wait until the MP3 loads completely, just set this to false.

With sIFR 3 still in beta, let’s explore hacking sIFR 2 to behave with more of today’s Flash functionality.

To get started, download sIFR 2. A common complaint about sIFR font replacement is that the fonts look too pixelated or light. A quick trick to fixing this is to up the Flash version from 6 to 8. Edit “sifr.js” on line 7 change “var a=6” to “var a=8” so that we’re detecting for version 8. The fonts won’t look perfect, but they will be noticeably better.

Next, we can add letter-spacing functionality to sIFR. Open up “dont_customize_me.as” (don’t worry) and place this at line 92:

if (letterSpacing != null) fmt.letterSpacing = Number(letterSpacing);

With this technique we control the letter spacing using flash vars:

sFlashVars:”otherflashvar=true&letterSpacing=2″

Finally, when you publish, make sure to export it for Flash version 8 with ActionScript 2.0. … (more…)