Pausing Sounds (Music)

In this tutorial, you're going to learn how to pause sound objects in flash and make the sound/music resume exactly from where it was paused.

Note: This tutorial is much shorter than it seems, extra explanation is provided for your own benefit.

There are two ways to do this in flash:

The complicated way:

Using the "Get time" action to calculate the total duration of your sound object, measuring the elapsed time and making the sound object resume next time based on the calculated previous elapsed time. It involves complicated action scripting, which would make this tutorial listed in the "Advanced" category instead. Morover, the result is not always perfect, you can't get a 100% precision when it comes to resuming the sound object from where it was left out.

The easy way:

By setting your sound object to "streaming" and using a couple of simple action scripts to start and pause your sound, 100% precision. And that's what we're going to do in this tutorial. :)
By using "Streaming" sound, it means we are going to spread the music over the timeline of flash. We will place the object into a movie clip and it will be played normally like any flash animation once the "play" button is pressed. Pausing the movie clip in which the object resides will also result in pausing the sound object. We can resume that by using the "play" action again.

Let's get started!

1:

• Start by creating 2 layers as shown in Fig 1, name them accordingly.
  
  
  

  Fig 1

Next, we're going to create a Movie Clip in which our sound object will be placed.

2:

Once you create your new symbol, you will be taken to it and you will notice Layer 1.

Fig 3

Now we're going to import our sound to flash.

• Select the second keyframe of Layer 1 and select "Insert Keyframe" (there's a good reason behind choosing the second frame instead of the first one, i will explain that in the following steps).
  
  

  

  Fig 4

• Go to Windows>Properties. The Properties panel should appear at the buttom of the screen, select your sound object and set Sync to Stream -as shown below- and Loop to 0 just for this tutorial.
  
  

4:

Ok, now we're going to "spread" our sound/music over the timeline.

Depending on the length of your sound, right-click a keyframe on the timeline and select "Insert Keyframe".
Notice Fig 5, my music almost ends by the 190th keyframe. what we want is having the whole sound clip be played in flash, so we have to make sure we don't "insert keyframe" before the sound/music ends.

Fig 5

Go back to the first frame, righ-click it and select Actions. Add a stop (); action to it.
The reason why we left that single keframe and added a stop action to it is because we don't want flash to play our music once the file is loaded, we want to control it and play it only when the "play" button is pressed.

5:

That's what your timeline should look like.

Fig 6

• click on "Scene 1" as shown in Fig 6 to go back to the main stage.

Only 3 more steps are left and you're going to be able to pause your music in flash :)

6:

Ok that looks good. We're back to the main stage, now we're going to place our Movie Clip that holds our music on the stage.

• Go to Windows>Library and drag the "mymusic" movie clip to the stage, as shown in Fig 7.
  
  
  

  Fig 7

• Click on the keyframe of the "sound" layer. You'll notice a little circle on the stage with a little "+" sign, that's the movie clip that we dragged. If you double click that, u'll be taken to it, you don't have to do that now, if you do, make sure you get back to scene 1 for the following step.
  
  

7:

Now we're going to add an "Instance Name" to our movie clip, this name will be used as a target to play and pause the movie clip.

• Click once on the little "+" sign as shown above and go to to the Properties panel.
• Name the movie clip "mymusic" as show in Fig 8.
  
  
  

  Fig 8

Good work, the following page is the last one, we're going to add actions to buttons.

8:

In this step, we're going to add 2 buttons to the "buttons" layer.

Fig 9

• As shown in Fig 9, click on the first frame of the "buttons" layer and create 2 buttons, play and pause.

• Right-click on the "play" button, go to Actions and add the following action:

Add the following action to the "pause" button:

you're done! good job, now test your movie. :)

Conclusion:

What we did:

• Created 2 layers, one for the buttons, and another for the sound object.
• Imported our sound object to flash, placed it into a new Movie Clip we named "mymusic".
• Dragged the Movie Clip from the library to the "Sound" layer of the main stage.
• We added an Instance Name to our movie clip, this name was used in the Actions as a target to play and stop the movie clip.
• Created 2 buttons, one for "play" and the other one for "pause"
• added actions to the buttons.

A 100% precision, with minor action scripting. Hope you enjoyed this tutorial.

Download *.fla