This morning when I couldn't sleep (I'm sorry PST, but I'm a CST guy and always will be) I thought that it might be kind of fun to look into added sound effects to an Adobe AIR application. I've worked with sound before. I've got a sample application that lets you drag a MP3 file onto it and the code will then parse the ID3 info and find the lyrics for you. But I wanted to add something simpler to an application - like a button click sound. The code for playing a song versus a sound effect isn't really any different, but here is a simple example to give you an idea of how you can do it.
Since the code is short enough, I'll paste in the entire thing and then explain what I'm doing:
<html> <head> <title>New Adobe AIR Project</title> <script type="text/javascript" src="lib/air/AIRAliases.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="lib/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script> <script> $(document).ready(function() { //preload the sounds var snd1 = air.File.applicationDirectory.resolvePath("lib/sound/button-4.mp3"); var btn1 = new air.Sound(new air.URLRequest(snd1.url)); var snd2 = air.File.applicationDirectory.resolvePath("lib/sound/button-5.mp3"); var btn2 = new air.Sound(new air.URLRequest(snd2.url)); $("#btnTest").click(function() { btn1.play(); }); $("#btn2Test").click(function() { btn2.play(); }); }); </script> <input type="button" id="btnTest" value="Test Sound"> <input type="button" id="btn2Test" value="Test Another Sound"> </body> </html>
</head> <body>
You can look at this code snippet as two distinct parts - the layout and the JavaScript code. The layout is pretty simple, two buttons. The code shows how MP3 files are loaded. (I should point out - you can only work with MP3 files.) You begin by simply creating a pointer to your file. In this case my files are stored relative to my application in a lib/sound folder.
var snd1 = air.File.applicationDirectory.resolvePath("lib/sound/button-4.mp3");
You then create a new Sound object. Sound objects take URLs, not paths, so we use the url property of the file object.
var btn1 = new air.Sound(new air.URLRequest(snd1.url));
The final part is to create a way to play the sound. I've done this with an event handler on my buttons:
$("#btnTest").click(function() { btn1.play(); });
And that's it. I've packaged up the zip and a compiled AIR file and attached it to this blog entry. You can, of course, do a lot more complex things with sound in AIR. Check the Working with Sound part of the docs for more info.
p.s. Sound effects courtesy of Soundjay.com.