Delay before playing embedded mp3 in Actionscript / Flex 3

Question

I am embedding an mp3 into my Flex project for use as a sound effect, but I am finding that every time I play it, there is a delay of about half a second from when I call .play() to when you can hear the sound. This makes it weird because I want the sound effects to sync to game events. My mp3 itself is only about a fifth of a second long so it isn't because of the contents of the mp3.

I'm embedding with

[Embed(source="assets/Tock.mp3")]
[Bindable]
public static var TockSound:Class;
public var tock_sound:SoundAsset;

and then playing with

if (tock_sound == null) {
  tock_sound = new TockSound() as SoundAsset;
}
Alert.show("tock");
tock_sound.play();

I know there's a delay because the sound plays about a half second after the Alert displays. I did consider that maybe it was the initial loading time of constructing the TockSound, but the delay is there on all the subsequent calls as well.

How can I avoid this delay on playing a sound?

Update: It turns out this delay is only present when playing the swf on Linux. I believe it is a Linux-specific flaw in Adobe's flash player.

Can you check whether the sound is ready? i.e. the status of the mp3? — milesmeow
Have you checked stackoverflow.com/questions/227674/… for additional help? — zaf

Jolly Roger Jolly Roger · Accepted Answer · 2010-02-10T21:29:15

Not sure about the reason, other than Flash always has had some bad audio latency issues. Read Tinic's blog to stay on top of this stuff: http://www.kaourantin.net/

One thing that might help: make sure your MP3 is 44.1kHz or else Flash will need to resample it.

You can actually embed a WAV file, it just takes work. You embed it as a byte array, and in FP9, dynamically construct a SWF file on the fly. Pretty horrible, but doable. :-) In FP10, you can use the dynamic sound API, so it's easy.

Delay before playing embedded mp3 in Actionscript / Flex 3

4 Answers