Month: March 2013

Recommended MP3 Settings for Flash Player

I recently ran into another MP3 issue while working on a Flash Project. I found this one while working on an iPad app in Flash Builder. I meant to write about this issue a long time ago when some mp3 files that I was using on a website sounded really bad in the Flash Player. So here is my recommended MP3 Settings for mp3 files used in ActionScript applications:

  • Sample Rate – 44100 Hz (this one is the most important, if it is not set to this, it can sound bad, slow, fast, garbled)
  • Channels – Stereo or Mono work fine (for most sound effects I use mono)
  • Bit Depth – 16
  • Sample Rate – 128 Kbps (you can use higher or lower, I haven’t noticed too much improvements going higher, but it’s definitely noticeable as you start going lower)

This is probably common knowledge to most people working with Flash applications and ActionScript, but if not, I hope this helps.

Mp3 works on pc but not on my iPad Starling

I have been using Flash Builder and Starling 1.3 to create some iPad apps and recently ran into an issue that was making me want to pull out my hair. Luckily for me I don’t have any hair. The latest version of Starling (1.3) has a new AssetManager class in the starling.utils package. It’s pretty cool, it handles the loading and accessing of all of the assets for your apps. In the app that I’m working on I’m using it to load the graphic assets and the audio assets. Sounds simple enough right? That’s what I thought too, but then I ran into a little problem. When I ran the app on my PC using the AIR simulator the audio played fine, but when I ran it on my iPad I couldn’t hear any audio. It wasn’t throwing any errors, I just couldn’t hear anything. After trying everything I could think of, one of the guys that I work with told me to send him the audio files I was using and he would try them in his app. That got me thinking and so asked him to send me some of his audio files as well because they were working. So he did and they worked in my app. To make this long story short, the problem was with the particular MP3 files. I opened them up in Audition and saved them at a different bitrate and that did it. Not sure how many people will run into this, but if you do, try saving the mp3 file differently and see if that fixes it.