Flash is widely used on the internet to show movies or play audio,  but adding long music music pieces to a Flash movie can make it too large to load quickly when it’s online.  The solution is to use Flash music loops instead -  a loop is an audio file that’s usually only a few seconds long, carefully prepared so that  when it plays to the end it can instantly restart from the beginning again, without you being able to hear the join.  Because it’s much shorter than a full-length song, it’s much faster to load and doesn’t slow down the loading times for the end user.  Here’s how to easily add a music loop to your Flash movie.

Flash will recognise .aif .wav and .mp3 music file formats. For seamless audio loops it’s important to use a music file that has already been prepared to loop seamlessly, such as the Flash Music .wav loop files we supply on www.royalty-free.tv.   Don’t try to use an mp3 file to loop seamlessly, this doesn’t work since mp3 files will not loop without an audible ‘click’ at the end/start looping point – very annoying!

To import your chosen sound file, from the main menu within Flash choose file>import>import to library. In the dialogue box that appears, choose the file you want to import and click it. If you’re on a Mac choose Import, on Windows choose Open. This will import your chosen audio music file into the Library of your project. The next step is to add this audio to the timeline of your movie.  First, you need to create a new layer in the timeline, click the Insert New Layer icon to do this.  It’s a good idea to name this new layer “sound” by double-clicking the layer name and typing in the new name.  Then click on your chosen sound file in the Library and drag/drop it onto your new ‘sound’ layer, and you’ll see it appear in the first frame.  You can preview your movie by selecting Control>Test Movie.

Since your imported flash music loop wav file is designed to loop seamlessly to create a continuous soundtrack, you will need to enable this “loop” option option. Click on the  music file you want to loop, then look at the Properties Inspector. You’ll see a menu option “sync”, to the right you can set the loop options to “loop”.  That’s it -  now you have a continuous music background,  using only a small music file!