Sound can be a valuable component of a piece. It can provide information as a narration, enhance the mood of a scene, provide a transition between scenes, or be the focus of the entire piece.
Sound is contained in a sound icon. The sound icon's position on the flowline establishes when the sound plays. The Sound Icon Properties dialog box lets you specify which sound to play and the way it plays. For information on specific procedures, see Sound--step-by-step procedures.
Guidelines for using sound
Follow these guidelines when you use sound in your Authorware piece:
It's easier to edit the sound to begin and end where you want before you import it. This is because you must use Authorware functions to specify starting and stopping points of a segment in a sound file, unlike digital movies, from which Authorware can easily select a range of frames.
Because sound icons are branching icons, they cannot be direct children of interaction, decision, digital movie, or framework icons. However, if you drag a sound icon to an interaction, decision, digital movie, or framework icon or another sound icon, it will automatically be placed in a new map icon.
Make sure each sound has been recorded at a sampling rate that will give you the sound quality you need for the particular use. The higher the sampling rate of a sound, the better the sound quality but the larger the sound file. For example, music CDs are sampled at 44 kHz, voice-overs may be sampled at 22 kHz, and short sound effects may need no more than 11 kHz. If you're delivering the piece containing the sound over the web, save the sound at an 8-bit sample size and at a sample rate of no more than 11 kHz. Smaller sample rates, such as 5 kHz or 7 kHz, may also be sufficient.
Mono sounds are significantly smaller than stereo sounds. Unless you require stereo for some specific purpose, always save your sounds as mono to save disk space.
Compress sounds using Shockwave Audio (SWA), MP3, Voxware (VOX), or ADPCM compression.
Make sure users' computers have sound cards. A computer that has no sound card can play a piece that includes sound, but the sound itself won't play.
For 16-bit sounds, make sure users' computers have sound cards capable of playing 16-bit sounds.