audio streaming problem? pleaze help

[cre8ive]

The global property call "Sound buffer time" is set to 5 by default.

This mean that's the streaming sound will not play until 5 second have been preloaded.

[magiksound]

yes, I understand that, and as per your instructions, set it to 0, and used my perloader to load aprox. 25 seconds of sound, the crash is happens right after the movie plays to that point.

[cre8ive]

I'm not familiar with that problem, and I stream large audio files, sometimes as long as 10 minutes. Perhaps it is a coding issue.

[magiksound]

well, I forgot to add it works fine with a dgital connection the problem occurs with 28.8 and somtimes with 56, thanks for your help, a most excellent thread

[MrBean]

Well, I must say this is a great thread.
I'm having some trouble with the looping script.

In the first frame I have the sound.swf loading into _level20. Then there is a small 2 second animation so that I can time the loading. then in frame 48 I have this script:


if (getProperty ("_level20", _framesloaded )=100) {
gotoAndPlay (50);
tellTarget ("_level20") {
play ();
}
}
gotoAndPlay (2);


Well, this works on a high speed connection. But on a 28.8
the music does not play.
What am I doing wrong?
I tried putting in an else before the gotoAndPlay (2);
but that didn't work.
Thanx for your help
Bean

[magiksound]

two possible sugestions:
1. place " goto and Play 2 " outside your "If" statement
2. if your level 20 audio swf is in a pre-loader loop, a "Play" action will not kick it out, use a "goto lable".

If I have understood your method correctly...

[MrBean]

In my neverending tests and research, I noticed one thing.
this may be common knowledge to all you streaming audio peoples but it was news to me.

I have been trying to make this 3 1/2 minute animation to stream on a 28.8 and preload at 15 secs. And I was trying all the suggestions in this thread.

It wasn't working for me. I finally tried just playing the audio.swf on my test machine to see how it would stream. And I discovered something very interesting. My test machine is connected at 19.2 to ensure the best possible test (and because the presets were only 19.2, 38 and 57). And the aduio was choking. I was perplexed why this is.

Finally I realized that the aduio was taking all the cache. It was the compression settings in flash's Publish settings. I had them set to 16kbps (fast). And that was the reason it was choking on the test machine. It made no difference what size the audio was or what the compression settings it had before it was imported into flash.
I tried it at 8kbps (best) and it worked without a glitch. It also brought my preload down from 40sec to 4.6 What a difference.

I know 8kbps sounds bad. But this one only has Voice over.
What else can I do?

If anyone has a better suggestion, I'm all ears. Because I would prefer it to be set to 16kbps.

Thanx
Bean



[Edited by MrBean on 05-14-2001 at 02:02 PM]

[magiksound]

hmmm, I wonder if this is the cause of older machines freezing while loading large audio files???

[GMF ™]

Sound is data intensive. The quality of the sound output and length of playback factor prominently into the amount of data required. Sounds with higher sample rates (22.5Khz and above) retain a greater degree of quality, but almost always require too much data to realistically stream sound to the Flash player on time over a 28.8Kbps modem. Flash utilizes compression to help reduce the size of the data - but even the maximum compression allowed in Flash may not be sufficient to deliver high quality audio over longer periods of time. Here are some tips to use sound more efficiently:

Use the lowest bit-depth and sample rate acceptable to achieve the smallest data size.
Sound quality deteriorates as the sample rate declines, so you may find lower sample rates yield more even playback but also poorer quality audio. Try to find a happy medium between quality and data size.

Keep sounds short.
Flash doesn't have the same type of compression capabilities as Shockwave streaming audio, so it is ill suited as a means to deliver longer audio programs. You may use smaller sounds looped to achieve longer audio playback because a smaller amount of sound data is downloaded once and used repeatedly.

Watch the size report closely for clogging of data near keyframes.
The Event synch option delivers the sound data all at once when needed for playback; Stream synch delivers the sound data over the specified series of frames. Watch the size report closely for clogging of data near keyframes and use the "preloading" techniques to trim down the amount of data needed per frame or per second.