Flash fallbacks

This may seem strange, but there are a few situations where you may want to use Flash for sound. For example, you may have designed a simple game with HTML because you wanted to target iOS devices and desktops at the same time. But you want older browsers such as IE 6 to have sound too. Or you want to use only MP3 and provide Flash for devices that don't support it. Those are some situations where you may want to use Flash if the HTML5 Audio element is not supported.

There are some libraries that allow you to abstract this; we will take a detailed look at one of them—SoundManager 2—and then a quick overview of some available alternatives.

SoundManager 2

To use SoundManager 2 (http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/), you only need to include a smallish JavaScript code on your page and provide a link to the Flash files (hosted on the same server to comply with the same-origin policy). Let's have a quick look at what the implementation of preloading would look like...