Adding Sound > Adding sound overview

Flash offers a number of ways to use sounds. You can make sounds that play continuously, independent of the Timeline, or you can synchronize animation to a sound track. You can attach sounds to buttons to make them more interactive, and make sounds fade in and out for a more polished sound track.

You can use sounds in shared libraries, to link a sound from one library to multiple movies. You can also use sounds in Sound objects, to control sound playback with ActionScript.

There are two types of sounds in Flash: event sounds and stream sounds. An event sound must download completely before it begins playing, and it continues playing until explicitly stopped. Stream sounds begin playing as soon as enough data for the first few frames has been downloaded; stream sounds are synchronized to the Timeline for playing on a Web site.

You select compression options to control the quality and size of sounds in exported movies. You can select compression options for individual sounds with the Sound Properties dialog box, or define settings for all sounds in the movie in the Publish Settings dialog box.

For an interactive introduction to using sound in Flash, choose Help > Lessons > Sound.