TechnowledgeBase

FlashVars

If you have a Flash applet that must behave differently in different situations, but is still essentially the same animation, you should use parameters to tell your animation what you want it to do in each case. A parameter is some piece of information… a background color for instance… that is passed into the Flash animation from somewhere else (typically, from the web page in which it is hosted). The Flash file uses that information just like any normal variable that was declared inside the file.

There’s a trick to using parameters in Flash… but fortunately, it’s an easy trick:
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Popularity: 8% [?]

“One or more files were not imported because there were problems reading them”
“File type is not recognized”

I’m trying to produce my next flash masterpiece when I start getting errors whenever I drag an mp3 file into the Library.

The Problem:
Flash tells me that “One or more files were not imported because there were problems reading them,” or “File type is not recognized”. That’s odd because the files play perfectly fine in my audio applications. They’re not corrupt… so what gives!?

The Cause:
Adobe/Macromedia Flash is picky about the exact type of audio files it imports. Very picky. Very exact.

The Solution:
In the case of WAV files, it wants PCM wave files… so if your file is in another format, you’ll need to convert it. That simply consists of going into your audio editor of choice, loading the wave file, and saving it as another file with different encoding options.

With MP3 files… well, Flash doesn’t like them with bitrates over 160kbps. But you can make it play nice by installing Quicktime. Flash will talk to Quicktime behind the scenes and use it to import your MP3’s without the dreaded “One or more files were not imported…” crap.

To me, both of these are really work-arounds and NOT solutions. It’s 200-frigging-7, software as advanced as Flash should be able to recognize more than a narrow band of settings for popular audio formats. And it should do so without having to install some extraneous crap, Quicktime. But until Adobe corrects the issue, this is what we have to live with.

Popularity: 21% [?]