Loading music separately

I currently have a music file that is being imported from an external SWF file. The problem is, the music takes forever to load (it's about 3 megabytes) and I don't want the users to have to wait for it to load before they can view the content of the scene.

How can I load the scene minus the music first, and then load the music second?

this all depends upon how you have your movie set up.

assuming you want to load all frames in scene 1 before loading a sound, one approach would be to set up an ifFrameLoaded() timeline loop before scene 1 contents. Once flash loads all frames in the scene then load the sound as an external SWF in another level.

Code:

---

// frame 1
ifFrameLoaded(last frame  number of scene){ // scene loaded
  loadMovieNum("urlto.swf",1); // start loading sound
  gotoAndPlay(3); // jump out of loop
}

// frame 2
gotoAndPlay(1); // loop back until scene loaded

---

frame 3 is actual start of scene 1.

You may also be able to use a label as the condition for ifFrameLoaded() which would be more flexible than a frame number incase you add more frames to the scene later. You might also put the ifFrameLoaded loop as the first scene in your timeline as a "preloaded" scene, just to be consistent with your movie strcture.

Thanks, I think I understand most of that; I'll jot it down for next time.

I did some more hunting around and I found this excellent tutorial, which helped me do everything I wanted to do and more.