FLASH: Huge music files in flash

[Todd Ashworth]

Let me start off by saying I'm a ColdFusion developer by trade and don't

deal with graphics/animations/multimedia stuffs very often.  Well, for some

reason, the powers that be have decided that ColdFusion also includes Flash

.... um, ok.  Anyway, now I have this minor Flash project and I have no clue

what I'm doing.  I'm hoping someon can really help me out here.


I have an approx. 60 second video clip that I want to turn into a flash

movie.  No problem so far.  I broke the movie into about 1500 frames and

imported them all in.  It all works just fine.  The problem is that the

person I am doing this for wants a song to play while the little movie is

playing.  I'm not talking about a small loop here, they want an entire 3 1/2

minute song!


Problem 1.  The wav file is huge!  Thank goodness Flass compresses it to MP3

Problem 2.  The song is longer than the video clip.  When the video clip

reaches its end, it restarts.  When it does, it starts a new instance of the

song which playes over top of the first instance .. very ugly sounding.


So .. I get the bright idea of splitting them up.  The video animation and

the sound clip in seperate Flash files are, in total, smaller than the

combined files originaly.  As a result, the video clip loads and plays

*much* faster.  The problem is that the music clip won't stream with the

video like it did when the files were combined.  Instead, the web page waits

until the *entire* music Flash movie thingy loads before it starts playing

the music.  In the meantime, the video is playing and it all looks rather

silly.


Does anyone know how I can get the video and music to start playing at or

very near the same time, but remain independant of each other in terms of

starting and stopping times, etc.?


I'm sure I'm making a huge mess, so any help is appreciated.


Todd




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