Fix for no sound in Flash Player or Quicktime on a Mac

Author: scott

18 Mar

Not sure if this is a known issue, or a known fix (workaround). It’s a weird one. For whatever reason, I was getting no sound when test publishing (Command Enter) from the Flash IDE. I also noticed I wasn’t getting any sound when viewing a quicktime video. So I decided to scour the web for a solution. I found one.

Turns out all you have to do is open up GarageBand, create a new project, play a few notes on the piano (I chose Beethoven’s 5th, followed by Push It by Salt n Pepa - I don’t think these songs had anything to do with the fix), close GarageBand, and viola, sound again in the Flash Player and Quicktime.

I’m not sure why this works. Does anyone out there know why? Or better yet, does anyone know a proper fix for this? Mr. Jobs, are you reading my blog?

Filed under: Mac Tips, Technology

7 Responses for "Fix for no sound in Flash Player or Quicktime on a Mac"

John March 18th, 2007 at 11:40 pm 1
Actually there is another solution that is easier.

Open up Applications/Utility/Audio Midi Setup and change the audio output back to 44100 hz
Scott March 18th, 2007 at 11:41 pm 2
Isn’t social netowrking wonderful. Thanks John!
Colleen November 14th, 2007 at 11:40 am 3
Neither of these solutions worked for me.
Flounder December 11th, 2007 at 6:23 pm 4
John’s solution worked for me, thanks
Eric January 14th, 2008 at 8:08 pm 5
Didn’t work for me either. I deleted QT prefs, reinstalled QT 7.4, rebooted several times, repaired permissions, changed audio midi settings to 44.1 (along with plonking in GarageBand) and tried listening with another identity. Still no sound. QuickTime movies are the only affected audio.

This happened immediately after I opened and ran a movie in MPlayer 2.0, in case anyone has that app.
Naomi Pierce March 29th, 2008 at 8:47 pm 6
Thank you SO much for this fix. I began having this problem after downloading a Java applet while working on a client’s Flash project. I suspected some system setting had been affected, but after doing some preliminary trawling of the Web I upgraded from Flash 8 to Flash CS and found the problem still occurred. No sound when playing the timeline — in fact the timeline stopped altogether. When I selected “Mute” under “Control” the timeline played fine, but I couldn’t hear the sound. This didn’t affect publishing the document as an .swf file, so I lived with it (uneasily).

When I tried John’s solution (resetting Audio Midi preferences) this didn’t work because my Audio Midi preferences don’t allow me to access output settings, for some reason, just input settings.

I do have Audacity, though, and only started using it recently . . .

At any rate, the GarageBand fix worked for me and I’m very grateful to everyone who posts here!
Ron September 4th, 2008 at 6:07 pm 7
I updated my Flash player to hear streaming audio on the David Byrne site for his new disc with Brian Eno and after that I had no sound on the timeline or in the Flash CS3 library. I had a guy from Adobe tech support on the phone for like, over an hour and I wound up reinstalling the Flash player along with my whole CS3 suite and still nothing. Tonight I opened Garageband and problem solved! Thank you for sharing your experience.