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In the final week of the ActionScript intro we get into using sounds with ActionScript, and play audio which is external to our flash file(s), embedded within our flash files as well as covering topics like offsetting and repeating. We also create our own custom pause function (because weirdly, the functionality isn’t natively available).

This wraps up all the ActionScript stuff I taught over a brief course about a year ago, and I’ve got to say, I didn’t mind ActionScript 3 as a language at all. You can do a lot of nice bits and pieces with it which can be embedded directly on the web, or you can use it for some quick prototyping (although if you were prototyping some serious effects, you’d probably be more likely to do so in the processing language), so yeah. Glad I spent a month or so getting my head around it.

Download link: An Introduction to ActionScript 3.0 – Week 9
Audience: Beginners who know a little about variables, functions, objects and how to perform some basic programming math.
Format: PDF
Content License: The document, its contents and the provided source code are released under a creative commons non-commercial attribution share-alike 3.0 license by me (r3dux) and comes with no guarantee of correctness, fitness for purpose or anything of the sort. The audio samples used are the property of their respective owners and are used under a fair-use type of deal.

If you’ve followed the series of posts over time, or just stumbled across one week’s worth of notes and found it useful, then I’m happy I went to the effort – and if you’ve learnt something from them then even better

Cheers!

You’re bound to have heard the Prodigy‘s Smack My Bitch Up (incredible, and incredibly NSFW, video @ link) – but how was the song made? What goes into making one of the highest regarded dance tracks of the past 10 years?

Well, a bloke called Jim Pavlov knows – and to prove it, in case you didn’t believe him, has recreated the entire song by taking the samples from their original sources, modifying them in similar ways to how Liam Howlett must have to create the original, and slung the meat of the process together into this spiffy video:

Now, it’s not short at 10 minutes – but it’s really interesting to hear the original samples and then see them modified, in front of your very eyes, to the final states that make up each constituent part of the track.

That kind of sampling and effects knowledge just does not happen overnight… Awesome stuff.