by Grant Skinner

Flash Player 9 / AS3 Sound Crashing Bug

Here’s a simple bug in Flash Player 9 that crashes every browser I’ve tested it in. Simply call Sound.play(position) with an out of range position. For instance, the example below plays a 25 second sound with a starting position of 30,000 milliseconds.

This bug wasted an hour of my time while I tried to figure out why short tracks were crashing a computeSpectrum demo I built, but long tracks weren’t. It turned out I had set a starting position of 2 minutes to jump to a particularly dramatic part of one of the tracks I tested, and I had forgotten about it. Hopefully this post will save someone else the same pain.

This will almost definitely crash your browser, so check to make sure you don’t have anything important open. If it doesn’t crash, post in the comments with your browser / OS / player version.

Click here to turn off the internet (err, view the crash demo)

UPDATE Feb 29, 2008: This bug was fixed in a player 9 update (r60 I believe). Be aware that it can still affect your users, who may not have updated!

Grant Skinner

The "g" in gskinner. Also the "skinner".

@gskinner

If you enjoyed this, you might like these articles…

Idle CPU Usage in Adobe AIR and Flash Player, Major Flash Player 8 Memory Leak, Flash Player 10.1 Prerelease on Labs, Failure to Unload: Flash Player 9’s Dirty Secret

29 Comments

  1. Dave May 28, 2007 at 6:37pm

    Yep, crashed my browser. FF2 / Windows XP Pro / Flash Player 9

  2. Keith Peters May 28, 2007 at 6:38pm

    Dude! You broke my internet!

  3. Algis May 28, 2007 at 9:19pm

    Crashed mine too. FF2/Win XP/FLP 9.0.45

  4. sascha/hdrs May 28, 2007 at 9:37pm

    FF 2.0.0.3, Win Vista, FLP 9.0.45 and crashed.

  5. Weyert May 28, 2007 at 9:43pm

    Yep broke my internet! Safari (2.0.4/b419.3) MacOSX 10.4.9

  6. Aaron Heimlich May 28, 2007 at 9:53pm

    Crashes on Firefox 2.0.0.3/Mac OS X 10.4.9

  7. fandango May 28, 2007 at 10:40pm

    crash:( win xp, firefox 2, FP 9.0.45

  8. Danger May 29, 2007 at 12:18am

    no crash:

    Windows Vista + IE7 + Flash Player 9

  10. mlinaje May 29, 2007 at 2:45am

    crash:

    Vista + Firefox 2.0.3 + FP 9.0.28.0

  11. Tore May 29, 2007 at 6:14am

    Didn’t crash on Lynx 😉 (Sorry, I didn’t even test it, but after hours of work that’s the level of humor that pops into the head 🙂

  12. chris May 29, 2007 at 8:56am

    Opera 9.20

    OS X 10.4.9

    Crashed

  13. Emmy Huang May 29, 2007 at 12:35pm

    Hi Grant,

    I’ve filed a bug for the crash.

    best,

    e

  14. William from Lagos May 29, 2007 at 8:49pm

    Crashed.

    IE7, Win XP SP2, Flash Player 9

  15. German May 29, 2007 at 11:15pm

    crash mine too… vista ie7 flash player 9

  16. 陈谦的blog May 30, 2007 at 12:09am

    Links for 2007-05-29 [del.icio.us]

    Google Operating System: Screenshots of YouTube's New Player gskinner.com: gBlog: Flash Player 9

  17. Jeremy Nicoll July 7, 2007 at 4:22pm

    This bug also affects the Flash authoring tool as well. I crashed it a couple of times after passing an undefined variable to Sound.play().

  18. NeAl August 13, 2007 at 1:52pm

    I just wanted to thank Grant for posting this blog. The hour you spent discovering this problem has already saved time for tons of others. Thanks on behalf of developers everywhere!

  19. dada August 21, 2007 at 6:47pm

    Hi,

    no crash for me :

    – XP SP2

    – Firefox 2.0.0.6

    – Flash Player 9,0,60,184 (maybe cause of this ^^)

  20. dada August 21, 2007 at 6:49pm

    Hi,

    no crash for me :

    – XP SP2

    – Firefox 2.0.06

    – Flash Player 9,0,60,184

  21. Bernardo Kuri October 31, 2007 at 2:54am

    crashed!

    – XP SP2

    – Firefox 2.0.0.8

    – Flash Player 9,0,45,0

  22. Nicolas Guionnet December 3, 2007 at 12:55pm

    … oh man, thank’s a lot for this info …

    This bug got me crazy today !

    I would probably be still stuck on my screen, roting my brain off without your article …

    And it seems that not so many guys wrote about it … that’s the only info I found !

    Bye…

    – XP SP2

    – Firefox

    – Flash Player 9,0,45

  23. William Khoe December 14, 2007 at 7:35pm

    No Crash…Firefox 2.0 Mac OSX

  24. lol February 8, 2008 at 11:46am

    -FF 2.0.0.11

    -XP SP2

    -flash 9.0 r115

    no crash … maybe the new player had a patch ?

  25. Mark Luker February 28, 2008 at 2:49pm

    No crash for me.

    IE6 (Intranet, can’t do anything about it)

    FP 9,0,115

  26. Andrey February 29, 2008 at 9:02am

    You have version 9,0,115,0 installed

    Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12

    Windows Vista

    NO crash..

  27. Philip March 28, 2008 at 12:18pm

    It did crash Firefox 2,0,0,13 with Flash Player 9,0,115 in WinXP.

    But I fixed this by running Firefox in WIN98/ME

    comparably mode.

  28. Pham Son Ha June 14, 2008 at 11:50pm

    No crash for me, FF3 w2k3

  29. flash design July 7, 2008 at 2:17pm

    Yeah crashing for me, also wasted an hour on this!

Comments are closed.