I’m interested in learning how to decode and playback audio in ActionScript 3. I understand how to write bytes to a Sound object using the SAMPLE_DATA event, so that’s not really a problem. What I want to understand is how I could implement alternate audio formats for native playback inside of Flash Player.
I guess what I’m asking is: how do I take something in X format and “convert/decode” it to WAV format and write the bytes to a Sound object, playing back the audio? I’m interested in writing a decoder for FLAC audio and possibly OGG audio, as these seem to be some of the most widely used open source audio formats.
Can anyone give me any advice on this?
If you want to write a decoder, the first thing you should probably look at is the spec for the format you want to decode.
The ogg/vorbis spec can be found here: http://xiph.org/vorbis/doc/Vorbis_I_spec.html.
Also, it could be of help to take a look (or maybe port) some other open source library that already does this (I’m not aware of any written in Actionscript), such as this, in Java: http://www.jcraft.com/jorbis/ (I don’t know this library, I’ve just found it googling “ogg vorbis open source”.
At any rate, you’ll have to put some work to get it working and I don’t mean this to discourage you, but I’m not sure Actionscript is fast enough for real time audio decoding.