flash (macromedia): I need help with synchronizing imported sound to the visual events in an
animation (such as when a character speaks). It seems that when the user stops
the movie, the sound does not stop. This means that background music and
dialogue are both thrown out of sync with the visuals whenever the user stops
and resumes the movie while a sound clip is playing.

To resolve this difficulty, I set each sound's property to "Stream" rather
than "Event," but this caused more problems than it solved. For some reason,
some of the sound (particularly those clips involving spoken dialogue) became
choppy, and even though the frames containing the sound clips were still
synchronized on the timeline where they were supposed to be, they played too
early even though I did not change the position of the keyframes on the
timeline. I've consulted every tutorial I could find about sound control with
ActionScript and E-Mailed Macromedia Support (who then referred me to a
technote about sound control), but these were all about assigning stopping and
playing options to different buttons rather than explaining how to synchronize
sound playback with the playhead of the main Timeline. Quite frankly, I'm
stumped.

Any advice anyone could give me on this subject would be greatly appreciated.

well, streaming audio is a good idea for synchronizing, but it's terrible when
there's a lot of images moving around. Streamed auido plays frame by frame, but
it'll skip frames to keep up with the auido. Whereas non-streamed is the other
way around.

What I would suggest is to take your audio and chop it up into seperate pieces
(about five seconds long) and put those in place like a puzzle. Then when it
doesn't sync up there'll be a short pause before the curser reaches the next
piece of audio. You can check out www.illwillpress.com for an example, while
the squirell is talking right click the screen and hit play, this'll end the
animation but the audio will continue for a short while. Right click and press
play again, and there will be a short period of silence as the animation
resumes, but once it hits the next five seconds of audio it'll be in perfect
synchronization.

By the way, if you watch anything on illwillpress.com, be prepared for some
harsh language.

Thanks, that helps a lot. I just made an animated birthday card for my father
using the method you suggested, and I didn't even notice any choppiness during
the breaks in between the fragmented sound clips. It sounded perfect, and I
stopped the movie at every point there was a broken clip just to test the
synchronization. It all ran very smoothly.

Thanks again!