Digital Workshop

One of the main contributors to published Flex files in audio-visual website production appears to be audio/music. Whatever format used (and .ogg seems to be smallest and best) the published file is considerably larger and slower to load than without music.
My question is, can media such as audio be played using files located on the website separately from the flex and html files? My 'launch webpage' can play .swf files, but only in another window or tab. Can they be forced to play in the background, invisibly? If so, I could simply bung the music in a flash file and launch that. In other words, apart from being able to launch remote files such as .swf, do all other media files have to be embedded in the flex? If they could reside on the web server, then I would hope multi-media Opus flex files could launch so much quicker.