A typical Sound Family will have 4 to 6 layers, for example: drums, bass, rhrythm guitar, lead guitar, and synth. When mixed, these instrument parts make up the main musical theme of a song. Each instrument part, or layer, is the smallest repeating riff of each instrument - usually 1, 2 or 4 bars (2 - 8 seconds) in length. DoReMedia Sound Families are engineered so that each of these short layer parts are accurate to the millisecond in length, and therefore loop perfectly. This is critical to keeping layers synchronized, as you will see in the following illustrations.

First, start by creating a new movie symbol {Insert > New Symbol} and calling it "soundtrack".

We will construct our audio layers in this separate movie, which will give us the ability to target it whenever we wish, and keep the main timeline uncluttered.

Open the library {Window > Library} and double click on the movie symbol you just created. This will bring up a new timeline for this movie symbol. Add as many layers as you have instruments, naming them to correspond to each instrument (ie. Drums, bass, rhythm guitar, etc.). Flash will allow between 4 and 8 simultaneous sound layers, depending on your sound card.
 

If you have not yet imported your audio files, do so now {File > import}. If there is not already a keyframe on frame one, add one from the insert menu {Insert > Keyframe}.

In the timeline, select the keyframe you just added and open the Sound Properties dialogue box {Windows > Panels > Sound}. Your imported audio files should all appear from the pull down menu. Select your drum track. Set the sync method to "Event" and enter a loop value of 16 (this can be changed later).

You now have a drum track which will last somewhere between 16 and 64 bars, depending on the length of the original clip. In order to see the visual display of the audio in the timeline, go to frame 600 or so and select all layers, then insert frames {Insert > Frame}. You can easily add or remove frames later.

Follow the same procedure for the other layers, selecting the corresponding instrument. When you are finished, you should have multiple layers with a different instrument on each layer.
 

*It should be noted here that the event sync method is preferrable if you want to keep file size to a minimum. The streaming method does not allow Flash to re-use the small component pieces from the cache, but rather, it copies the audio data into each frame. In this example, using the event method thus far would mean about 10 bars of total audio (approximately 20 seconds) to be downloaded (5 layers x 2 bars each), whereas the streaming method would force a download of 160 bars (5 layers x 2 bars each x 16 repetitions). Quite a difference!

Play your movie to hear all of the instruments mixed together. You have just laid the foundation that will allow you to build an interactive, dynamic soundtrack.

Once you have your individual instrument tracks accessible in this way, you can make use of a few simple techniques which will allow you to really harness the power of sound and music to a level unachievable with loops or pre-recorded production music.

Select an any instrument layer and goto the Sound Properties dialogue box. Click the edit button. A separate window will open that displays the audio waveform, click anywhere in the window. Flash will add an envelope which you can adjust by grabbing the box and dragging.

Once your soundtrack movie is as you like it, it's time to trigger it from your main movie. You can simply drag it from the library onto your timeline, or use frame actions and tell targeting. More information about tell targeting is available in Flash's help files and documentation.