Introduction

It all begin when I was sitting by my computer and thinking like always. I started my Winamp player to listen to some music, and then it hit me. Why not try to do a Mp3 with Flash 4? So I started to experiment with it and it worked! With even more things to it, like having a hidden *.swf in the Mp3!

This tutorial with take you through the process of creating Mp3s with flash.

Convert .MP3 to .WAV

The purpose of this tutorial is to convert an .WAV file to .MP3 using flash. So if you have a .WAV file ready to go, jump to the next step.

If you don't, then we are going to have to create one for the purposes of the tutorial. To do this, choose an .MP3 you want to convert to .WAV format. I used the winamp player to do this. So let me show you how.

1. Start winamp and go into preferences.
   
2. In the output folder chose "Diskwriter plug-in" and press configure.
   
3. Now choose the path you want the wav file written to (Remember that a regular 3 min long mp3 is about 40meg's!).
   
4. Now just press play as usual (DO NOT HAVE THE REPEAT ON!). You should not hear any thing during the process.

When you have the wav file, move on to the next step.

Importing Your .WAV File Into Flash

Now you have the wav file ready, we have to import the wav file into flash.

Start up Flash 4, open a new flash movie and save it. Next choose File> Import, find your wav file and press OK (if it's big you will have to wait a while). Now right click on the first key frame at the time line, and choose Properties.

Click on the sound tab. This is where you choose your sound.

And in the sync menu: you can choose Stream or Event (the difference is if you choose Stream, you have to make all the frames in the time line). If you need more information on adding sound check out the tutorial.

Now if you want, you can add any animations, links, pictures and text. Simply create a new layer and do your stuff (maybe add info about the wav file, artist, band or music).

Publish Settings

The next step is to modify the Publish Settings. Go to File> Publish settings ¡­ Press the Format tab. Here only have the flash format selected. And deselect the "use default names" . In the text field, change the file extension to "your name.mp3".

Now press the flash tab and press the set button depending on what type of sync you selected earlier. Choose the settings you want (The default for a mp3 song is, preprocessing: stereo, Bit rate: 128kbps, Quality: Best). Now press the publish (and wait? Like forever. Not really but long, if you don't have a quick computer).

Notify the Listener That There's More!

Now we're almost done, or rather we are done, but we should tell those that will listen to the mp3 that it has a cool info animation in flash.

We do that in the ID3 info.

Open your winamp player again and right click on the title.
Press "file info". Now here write:
Artist: "Rename 2 ^Title.swf^. u have"
Album: "2 have the Flash4 plug-in"
Comment: http://www.Macromedia.com.

A Tool to Help you with MP3s

This is an little extra for those people who have and use a lot of .MP3s in their flash work.

There is a little porgy that can help a lot - if you can spare US$50! It's called SwiffPEG. I had the demo 1.0 beta, and tried to use it to do this little tutorial. It worked just perfectly.

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, this little program takes an .MP3 file and places it in the flash movie file. It skips all the importing and exporting and saves you a lot of time. It's a tip, use it. Get SwiffPEG at http://swifftools.com

Well that's all folks. Enjoy!

discuss this topic to forum