Flash and AS3 Sound Controls: Story Shell (v.2)

Background: After I saw 12 by Cohen at the Calgary Herald's Web site, I thought this would make a fun assignment for my advanced students, who are learning how to use Flash. First I had to test the idea by building my own package. That's what you see above. It's not as complete as I would like (nothing about the 2010 Grammy for Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance, for example), but I'd give a student an A for this.

DOWNLOAD 112 KB (FLA only): Adobe Flash CS4 or CS5 required. The FLA contains all the ActionScript (AS3) but does not include the images or the audio files.

ActionScript 3.0: The script used here is pretty standard. I rewrote it for version 2, mainly to change the functionality of the Pause button.

External MP3 files: To make download time reasonable, the eight MP3s are external to the Flash (SWF) file. Each MP3 is about 360 KB. The SWF alone is 340 KB (containing 11 optimized images).

Dynamic text: There's a flaw with one of the album titles (The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle) on the player page -- poor planning on my part, and something to caution the students about.

Time spent: It took me 9 hours to build this, start to finish, including photo research and editing, writing, scripting, selecting and downloading eight songs, editing a 30-second excerpt from each song, designing, testing, etc. I wasted a fair amount of time trying some alternative ActionScript that I ended up throwing out. So if the students have the working code provided for them, it's a reasonable project (especially if they don't have to include as many as eight song samples).

Education use: This package was created as an example for my journalism students. It is not intended to be used commercially. You can see the assignment.

Use and re-use: Flash and AS3 Sound Controls by Mindy McAdams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Updated 10 March 2011