Loop for Flash presentation

[bcorkery]

A client of mine is building a Flash presentation and needs a 7 second file to loop. He wants an MP3 file but when I save the orchestral 7 seconds as MP3 the file has a short blank at the beginning and end of the file making the transition anything but smooth.

The wave file plays beautifully in Acid Pro 4.o and pretty smoothly in Winamp as a loop.

How should I deliver this file? Should I convince him to use the larger wave file? What causes the blank spaces on the MP3 file?

I'm going to deliver a 22,050KHz, Mono wave file for now and hope that works.

I'm not familiar with Flash and am hoping I can get some info from those of you who have experience with the program.

Thanks,
Bill Corkery

[Bob L]

Jeanne has not had much luck with the flash sites being able to seamlessly loop a background file... she has pretty much created loope files with a fade out at the end so that it transitions back around to the beginning more smoothly.

Perhaps someone else here will know of something that will allow a seamless loop in Flash.

Bob L

[bcorkery]

Thank you Bob. I did make that adjustment on the wave file I sent out.

I hope reconstruction is going smoothly.

-Bill Corkery

[Lance]

A client of mine is building a Flash presentation and needs a 7 second file to loop. He wants an MP3 file but when I save the orchestral 7 seconds as MP3 the file has a short blank at the beginning and end of the file making the transition anything but smooth.

The wave file plays beautifully in Acid Pro 4.o and pretty smoothly in Winamp as a loop.

How should I deliver this file? Should I convince him to use the larger wave file? What causes the blank spaces on the MP3 file?

I'm going to deliver a 22,050KHz, Mono wave file for now and hope that works.

I'm not familiar with Flash and am hoping I can get some info from those of you who have experience with the program.

Thanks,
Bill Corkery
Actually Bill, it is better if your client uses a regular .wav file. If you edit it so that it loops seamlessly as a wave, then when he drops it into Flash, it will loop seamlessly too. I have done a lot of these.

Flash has its own MP3 converter built in and your client can control all the aspects of quality vs. downloadability, etc. he can also chose to make a stereo file mono.

It will then be up to your client to program the Flash timeline to work exactly right, but that's not difficult.

HTH,

Lance

[MMP]

One trick I have used is to create the loop in MT mode with three regions of equal length. Then I use softedge to smooth out the loop. Then I build a mix to an adjacent track. I then use the boundries of the center region on the original track as a template to cut the built mix. Then, I mark the new center region on the built mix track, put the track in solo, and build the final wave.

This process may sound a little convoluted, but the end result is a loop with built in crossfading from soft edging to smooth the loop.

Regards,

MM

[Bert]

Yes this is a known issue in Flash. Besides importing wav's there is also a workaround in Flash that uses ActionScript. If anyone is still interested in that I can look it up later (I know of a discussion thereof in a German Flash forum which is down at the moment for maintenance).

Bert

[Lance]

One trick I have used is to create the loop in MT mode with three regions of equal length. Then I use softedge to smooth out the loop. Then I build a mix to an adjacent track. I then use the boundries of the center region on the original track as a template to cut the built mix. Then, I mark the new center region on the built mix track, put the track in solo, and build the final wave.

This process may sound a little convoluted, but the end result is a loop with built in crossfading from soft edging to smooth the loop.

Regards,

MM
Yes, I have used this too and it is very effective.

L.

[bcorkery]

Thanks everybody! This gives me a lot to work with.
I do have a question for Michael and Lance. What kind of setting do you use with the soft edge? Would it be a good idea to have a fairly gentle slope or make it a steep one?

Bill

[MMP]

Set to taste...once it sounds good as a loop, then procede with the buildmix and edit.

MM

[bcorkery]

Michael,

Thanks, I'll experiment though I thought the original :07 sounded great!
The client loved the rest of the files, all straight mp3's, but he's having trouble with the loop.

If your suggestion doesn't work for him, I'll deliver a longer loop with an obvious beginning and end. This way the gap while the loop resets, or whatever it does in Flash, will sound intentional.

Bill

[Veit Kenner]

This process may sound a little convoluted, but the end result is a loop with built in crossfading from soft edging to smooth the loop.
Nice trick. Thanks :-)

Veit

[Bob L]

From what Jeanne and I have experienced, the problem seems to arise from the fact that Flash players are not dependable on looping the file back to the beginning without a random gap... regardless of how smooth your actual file can loop on its own... internet connection speed, individual machine differences and more seem to be at play here and the result is less than repeatable in many cases.

The actual audio file playback seems to also be dependent on the actual flash page timeline loads at different times on different machines.

Bob L

[Jay Q]

The actual audio file playback seems to also be dependent on the actual flash page timeline loads at different times on different machines.I worked at an online greeting card company several years ago where we made Flash animated cards with looped audio (not MIDI) accompaniment. Don't know if it's still true, but at the time the performance of the cards was definitely different on different machines.

Jay

[Bert]

The actual audio file playback seems to also be dependent on the actual flash page timeline loads at different times on different machines.

Bob L

It is never advisable to use sounds on the Flash timeline for a number of reasons. I never had trouble triggering sounds with ActionScript though.

[bcorkery]

Thank you all for your input. I sent the client a 22.050/16bit mono wave file and it seems to be behaving.

Bill