The Power of Three: Flex 3, AS3 and MP3
by Simon Free
Long ago, websites featuring sounds dominated the Internet. Sound files in websites became the earmark of the inexperienced developer. Eventually people learned that adding a WAV file to every site did not always wow their audiences. The Internet, thankfully, became quieter.
Thanks to advances in audio compression technology, the commonplace nature of high speed Internet, and the growing popularity of podcasting and shared media, the Internet has become audible again. This time, though, correctly used audio files no longer signal a poor development choice, but rather a coder who has found the best way to get a message across.
The ubiquity of the Flash player, combined with the small file size of mp3s and the versatility of Flex, allows developers to make music, podcasts, and other audio assets easily accessible to the masses. The process is a simple one, and by the end of this article you will understand all the ins and outs of handling mp3s in your application.
We will review the basic functionality you will need to deal with mp3s, such as how to load the track and play it. We will then look at some of the information we can gather from mp3s through ID3 tags. We will finish off by looking at some cool data that can be extracted from the mp3s and turned into visualizations in only a few lines of code.
Read more of this article in Flex Authority Volume 2 Issue 1!