Page 7 —
Sound - The Weak Link
The animation file I had so far was a paltry 30 KB, but I knew that I couldn't celebrate yet since the size would double (at the very least) once I added a soundtrack. And if I remained faithful to the animation and used the entire soundtrack, that file would soar into the hundreds, if not thousands, of kilobytes. All that work spent keeping the file size down to a dull roar, and for what? Well, you could bet I wasn't going out like that. Come hell or high water, I was determined to keep "No Neck Joe" small.
I opted to reduce the soundtrack to just three short sounds. The first sound occurs in the opening credits: as the "No Neck Joe" text appears, a man's voice says "Nooooo Neeeck Joooooooe!" This is a defining element of the "No Neck Joe" animations, so I didn't even consider axing it. The second sound is the main musical motif, a loop that repeats four times during the main animation. The last sound is a thud, when Joe falls to the ground, which I actually pulled from Flash's own sound library. Each sound was saved as a 3-bit, 11.25-KHz, mono .wav file when the file was exported to Shockwave Flash. It sounds about as good as you'd expect from such a lo-fi solution, and it's a far cry from the soundtrack of the original video animation. But I think it does the job.
Note to Macromedia: Support for the MPEG 1 layer 3, or MP3 file format would allow CD-quality audio to be compressed to about a 12th of its original file size with virtually no loss in audio quality.
