Bring Your Flipbooks to Life With Audio and Animations

One of the key features of a flipbook maker is the ability to add animations to your content without touching any code. Better yet, you can enhance the flipbooks with audio to create a more immersive experience and these are the two concepts we want to cover today. Flipbook software has made this process incredibly easy but it pays to know the different kinds of animations and audio effects on offer. This is precisely what we’ll be looking at in this article.

Use audio to create a more immersive experience

Before we look at how to add audio to your flipbooks let’s take a moment to look at the different kinds of audio you can use.

Page turns

The most basic audio for any flipbook is the sound of pages turning. Normally, this comes as standard with your software so you won’t need to add those sounds. However, you should be able to turn those sound effects off if you don’t want them or add a mute button so users can switch audio on/off. Keep an eye out for that feature because unwanted audio is always annoying.

Background music

You’ll also find most software platforms allow you to add background music to your flipbooks. Background music can be an effective way to add a certain atmosphere or feel to your flipbooks but use it with caution.

The first thing to consider is that background music that plays automatically is bad practice for user experience. Unless your software comes with a specific option to start/stop audio, then you need to be careful here. In our experience, most don’t.

Also be aware that background music can conflict with other audio – especially if you’re flipbook contains video, but also other audio elements you decide to include.

Animation sounds

Some flipbook makers will also allow you to add sound effects to your animations. If you get this feature, it’s always best to keep things very subtle and use gentle sound effects for elements users interact with. This of these is audio confirmation that a user’s touch or mouse click has made something happen and keeps it natural.

Embed audio players

One common feature you’ll find is you can add an audio player into your flipbooks. This might be useful if you want to include an audio interview or podcast in your flipbooks. It’s a niche feature you’ll only need to use in certain situations but it gives users full control over audio play.

Audio for specific pages

You’ll often be able to add audio for specific pages that automatically play when users reach that part of your flipbook. It’s another feature you won’t want to go over the top with but it serves a function in certain settings.

How to add audio to your flipbooks

Adding audio will take a matter of clicks with whichever flipbook software you go for. You should find an audio tab in the main menu of your application but, if you have any problems, there are normally tutorial videos at hand. You can normally find these on your provider’s website or head over to YouTube for official and user videos. Here is the tutorial for FlipBuilder to give you an idea:

Bring page elements to life with animations

Most flipbook makers will also allow you to animate specific elements within your publication. These are taken right out of the jQuery API, including effects like fade in, fade out, a number of slide animations, and various other interactions.

Basically, this means you can animate in two different ways: animations that take place automatically and animations that are triggered by a user action – normally a click of the mouse by touching the screen.

This opens a world of opportunity for you to create immersive experiences. Let’s say you’re publishing a product catalog for the sake of example. Instead of simply listing your products with images, users could click to enlarge images, touch to read more information, click play to watch a video, or tap a link to go straight to your online store.

Take a look at this example from FlipSnack:

The animations you have available will depend on your software but these kinds of interactions are commonplace. How you use them is up to you.