What happened to the sound?

[Bling]

Hello, I put 3 little cartoons on my page. All the visuals work fine, and the movie made with a short wav file plays; but I tried a suggestion posted here about putting in a movie with sound only, and so made a single-blank-frame with an mp3 file added to it. Then exported as a Flash movie. It plays fine at home, although it refuses to loop, (using Dreamweaver to insert and preview it) but when I get to the page, it doesn't play at all. What went wrong? I'm using Netscape 4.75. Thanks for any help!

[Bob Hartzell]

There are several things happening at once. First off, I would make the sound movie as long as the sound. Add as many blank frames as necessary. Make that into a swf. Open it locally in your web browser. Can you hear the sound?

[Bling]

Thank you, adding frames worked! Now...
Maybe I just need a dictionary of terms so I don't ask stupid questions, like, "What's a Front Loader anyway?" (Around here, it's usually a tractor.) I tried to add the sound to an existing silent movie by 1)Load movie---but this, when I tried to see it: "An error occurred inside a plug-in contained on this page" although KM didn't crash. 2)From File, I tried to Insert Movie. This worked with a Picture movie, although the Insert didn't loop, just played once. With the pictureless Sound movie, I guess it was there, but no sound played. (I didn't Play Sound, which works fine, because the sound's longer than the movie.)
While I'm asking all this, I might as well add: What do you people mean by "daisy-chaining" little short movies together? Would that play the first while the next one is loading? Is that Load or Insert? Does sound come with it?
Thanks for the support!

[Bob Hartzell]

I tried to add the sound to an existing silent movie by 1)Load movie---but this, when I tried to see it: "An error occurred inside a plug-in contained on this page" although KM didn't crash.

-> Was the sound in the form of a .swf file? If not, enter the sound file in the sound section on Movie > Sounds and Actions. Load Movie is only for .swf files (no extension checking is done at this time).

While I'm asking all this, I might as well add: What do you people mean by "daisy-chaining" little short movies together?

-> What I meant was that you can string movies together by using load movie on the last frame of one movie to load the next movie. This allows you to play very long animations because streaming will help you out. Correct me if I am wrong, Johnie.

[johnie]

If you chunck up a download then it loads faster. It has something to do with the server. Splitting a large movie up will speed up download time.

By estimating download times you can make it so that one movie loads while the other is playing. This can be tricky but I have done it before. Wildbrain.com uses this for thier pieces. On the last couple of frames of a movie they have the new one load and then loop the last segment. Brad claims to have gotten this to work in KoolMoves and I got it to work with GetURL instead of Load Movie.

If you want smaller/faster moving files you also want to avoid transparancy where you can and also make sure your shapes are optimized. Look at the number of points you have used- See if they are all necasary, stuff like that. I posted on File optimization before.

[Bling]

Thank you thank you! I knew (hoped!) it would be something simple---I was trying to load a .fun file instead of .swf. Also, the viewer didn't have Flash (I usually use Netscape). Thanks again---I think I'm beginning to get it!