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As milchreis said, you need an encoder to convert raw sound data to specifoc format. The simplest way is to use WAV format, it's quite straightforward. You can code WAV encoder yourself or find one on internet. If you want MP3 or OGG, it gets complicated, I'm not sure if there exists any AS3 library for MP3 or OGG encoding. If you are targeting AIR, it's possible to use native extensions, and in Flash Player there is Adobe Alchemy, which is now known as CrossBridge.
Another way is to do encoding in server side.

At 6/4/14 07:50 AM, milchreis wrote: I see, you want duplicateMovieClip().

duplicateMovieClip() has many limitations and is not available in AS3.

At 6/2/14 11:09 AM, milchreis wrote: This is not very useful.
If you don't know the class, you don't know how to call the constructor either.

Instead, add a clone() method to the class of the object.
This keeps the process of deciding what information is necessary to duplicate an object within the class.
It can easily be used from outside without knowing the internals of the class.

Yeah, in situations where you want to clone objects with their current state it's good to have clone() method. But that covers only object initialization, not duplication.
I disagree that getQualifiedClassName() and getDefinitionByName() functions are nut useful. Imagine situation where only one class is implemented (Fruit), and all other classes (Apple, Banana, Grape) are only defined in Flash as subclasses of Fruit. Designer has created a scene with various fruits and programmer only knows that all of them are instances of Fruit. Now how to duplicate these fruits? I see only one way here, by using getQualifiedClassName() and getDefinitionByName() functions.

At 6/3/14 05:49 AM, Diki wrote: Starting out with HTML doesn't make sense; it's not a programming language. That's like suggesting someone start out with XML or by editing INI files. Learning HTML would be especially useless if the person learning it doesn't want to develop web-based applications. I also don't know why you made a dichotomy between HTML4 and HTML5; they're both HTML; the latter just includes more "features" (as close to features as a markup language can get) since it's the most modern revision.

HTML is clearly not a programming language, but it's core part of web development, so there is no way to go around it. If the person is not interested in web development then yes, there is no reason to recommend this path. It all depends on person's needs and current knowledge. In cases where people want to go deep into programming it's good to start from fundamentals, I agree with you, but I've seen many opposite scenarios where people just want to taste what the software development is. For them I suggest the easiest path possible, with no explanations about binary numbers, memory management, compilers etc.
And with HTML5 I mean "HTML5 apps", not the "HTML specification, revision 5" :)

I really like Python, but I wouldn't recomment it as a language to start with. When I started programming myself, with Pascal, the biggest problem was that I couldn't see how to create real stuff (windowed applications, web pages etc.) with it. You end up building terminal-like applications and start to treat the language as silly, "not real". And programming languages like Python have the same problem. The opposite is web development, where you see the relation with real world very clear. Or mobile development, where you build "real" apps from the very beginning. Or .NET with all it's stuff.
So I would recommend to start with HTML, then ActionScript, and later turn to HTML5 side or web development (server side stuff).

At 6/2/14 07:39 PM, danBuonocore wrote: I don't see how that helps. There's still the issue of not masking the scenery

I mean you can add masks to every enemy individually, your scenery will remain unmasked.

Another way to duplicate objects is by using getQualifiedClassName() and getDefinitionByName() functions. It's very useful in situations when you only have object instance and don't know it's class.
(this is just a note, MSGhero's suggestions fits better in your case)

Another way of doing that with masks:
Now you are generating a mask sprite, which is a sum of all view-circles, right? You can add that sprite as mask to all enemies. And mask should be placed in another MovieClip to be able to move it individually for every enemy. I hope you get the idea :) One possible optimisation is to enable masking only when it's needed.