Flash MX 2004 MP3 Player Pg.12
source: http://www.thegoldenmean.com/
12 — Make It Yours
Skinning the Basic Player
This paragraph should be replaced by a Flash movie if you have at least version 7 of the Flash Player and your browser has Javascript enabled.
A third variation on the basic Player. (Please don’t ask me for this .fla. I put the URL of the developer of the wonderful Knob Class so you could go get it yourself.)
My goodness - are you still conscious? Still with me? You deserve a medal for endurance.
Putting on a new face…
I have made repeated mentions throughout this tutorial about how adaptive it is to graphics of different sizes. I expect by now you are just about in a frenzy to get this plugged into your own site. Maybe “fenzy” is a bit of an exaggeration but really - if you are still reading you must have a pretty compelling reason!
This whole epic project started because persistent readers wanted a smaller Player than was possible in the previous tutorials using a ListBox component. I stated early in this tutorial that the primary limitation to this Player was how small you could make the controls and still have them be usable. If that is the only real limitation there isn’s much to prevent you from making this thing as wildly imaginative as you can think of, is there? No reason at all. There really are almost no constraints and only a few considerations you need to keep in mind.
Instance Names
If you elect to change the appearance of any of the visual assets in this project (and you should) just be sure either to keep the instance names the same as I did or at least have the sense to go throught the code and make approprite changes.
Modify Your Masks
I have stated in various places throughout this tutorial that the code is written to accomodate visual assets of virtually any dimension you choose. This is true so far as I have found. Change the length of the volume track, no problem. Change the width of the infoTxt text field or the pBar and dBar clips - no problem!
Do note however that the last two items mentioned (the infoTxt and the loadStatus modules) both use masks which need to be modified as well. That is an easy thing to overlook, so be warned!
Conclusion
Good job. You have a “smart”, very reliable and flexible MP3 Player for your site now. A Player that you now know inside and out, one that you can feel comfortable cusomizing to integrate perfectly with your website. You can embed the movie in a conventional html page; you can put it into a popup window by itself; you can load it into another Flash movie as an on-demand module. I hope that along the way you have learned some useful things about working efficiently with ActionScript using Flash MX 2004. Good luck. I hope you will send me a link to your completed project.
But wait - there’s more!
Yep. Learn how to dynamically evaluate your visitor’s connection speed and vary the buffer time accordingly on this page. And take a look at some other approaches to designing a Flash MP3 Player. Some are free, some cost money, some aren’t available for download but just look darn pretty. Food for thought and inspiration on this page.
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