loading sound externally...good idea???

[oldgym]

hello all i was creating a movie and wanted to cut down on the movie size.

on frame 5 of the timeline i have an mp3 that is synced with the animation, this goes on for 40 frames untill it stops and then on frame 41 another mp3 comes in as the background looped music. the overall swf size is 433 kb because of the two tracks.

i thought of loading the mp3's externally which will cut down the size to 43 kb and require only a 5-10 second preload stage.

but if i do that then when the timeline hits frame 5 it will call the mp3 which will probably have some bufer time and it will stop the animation while it retrieves the mp3 and then the same thing will happen again when it hits frame 41 for the 2nd mp3 file.

should i just keep the mp3's within the movie and let the end user wait 1-2mins for the loading so that they can get the full experience of the animation with sound??? do you know what im saying??

whats your thoughts, and experience!

[oldgym]

hello all i was creating a movie and wanted to cut down on the movie size.

on frame 5 of the timeline i have an mp3 that is synced with the animation, this goes on for 40 frames untill it stops and then on frame 41 another mp3 comes in as the background looped music. the overall swf size is 433 kb because of the two tracks.

i thought of loading the mp3's externally which will cut down the size to 43 kb and require only a 5-10 second preload stage.

but if i do that then when the timeline hits frame 5 it will call the mp3 which will probably have some bufer time and it will stop the animation while it retrieves the mp3 and then the same thing will happen again when it hits frame 41 for the 2nd mp3 file.

should i just keep the mp3's within the movie and let the end user wait 1-2mins for the loading so that they can get the full experience of the animation with sound??? do you know what im saying??

whats your thoughts, and experience!

[johnrevdirect]

personally i say include them, and my reason for this is my bias against dialup connections. a great number of people have faster internet connections nowadays, where 433kb takes about 3 seconds. its pretty much the only way to go, since the dialup connection will probably have an error or two and cause more buffer pauses than you anticipate. one thing you could do would be to sacrifice some file quality in your mp3s by reducing the bit rate, but that depends on what youre using the sound for. other than that, i say include.

rock.

[Egg Bramhill]

I don't know the statistics world wide, but as a guide line, only 20% of UK housholds that are internet connected, are connected via broardband. So with a download time of 1 minute/ minute and a half+ I would seriously ask whether you want the majority (80%) of visitors to view your site? Personally, I wouldn't wait for a minute to download such a large sound track, I'd be off looking at other sites. I suppose it's a question of whether the sound files are that important to the site (i.e. a group / band site ) but if it's just background music for an added effect, make 2 links. One for dial up without the sound and the second for broardband connections with the sound.
Egg