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

29 Comments

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

  2. Dude! You broke my internet!

  3. Crashed mine too. FF2/Win XP/FLP 9.0.45

  4. FF 2.0.0.3, Win Vista, FLP 9.0.45 and crashed.

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

  6. Crashes on Firefox 2.0.0.3/Mac OS X 10.4.9

  7. crash:( win xp, firefox 2, FP 9.0.45

  8. no crash:

    Windows Vista + IE7 + Flash Player 9

  9. crash:

    Vista + Firefox 2.0.3 + FP 9.0.28.0

  10. 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 🙂

  11. Opera 9.20

    OS X 10.4.9

    Crashed

  12. Hi Grant,

    I’ve filed a bug for the crash.

    best,

    e

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

    Crashed.

    IE7, Win XP SP2, Flash Player 9

  14. crash mine too… vista ie7 flash player 9

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

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

  16. 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().

  17. 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!

  18. Hi,

    no crash for me :

    – XP SP2

    – Firefox 2.0.0.6

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

  19. Hi,

    no crash for me :

    – XP SP2

    – Firefox 2.0.06

    – Flash Player 9,0,60,184

  20. crashed!

    – XP SP2

    – Firefox 2.0.0.8

    – Flash Player 9,0,45,0

  21. 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

  22. No Crash…Firefox 2.0 Mac OSX

  23. -FF 2.0.0.11

    -XP SP2

    -flash 9.0 r115

    no crash … maybe the new player had a patch ?

  24. No crash for me.

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

    FP 9,0,115

  25. You have version 9,0,115,0 installed

    Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12

    Windows Vista

    NO crash..

  26. 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.

  27. No crash for me, FF3 w2k3

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

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