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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs Apps
Wed, Mar 15 2006 at 6:31AM PST • Contributed by: WCityMike
I'm not sure if this problem is exclusive to Intel Macintoshes, but I first noticed it after an iTunes update; my Flash plugin had completely lost its sound.

Luckily, I found an extremely strange but workable fix in the Macromedia forums -- but you need GarageBand in order to implement it. Open GarageBand, and do something that generates music — I opened the piano keyboard and played a couple notes from the Star Wars theme. Quit.

You've most likely now got your Flash sound back.

Why this fix works, I have absolutely no idea. I imagine GarageBand might be doing something behind the scenes, but this has to be one of the more odd fixes I've ever run across. (But one of the most difficult fixes to find — thus the post here.)

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs | 26 comments | Create New Account
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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: chasebrowder on Wed, Mar 15 2006 at 8:22AM PST
yea i had this problem on my powerbook and that was the solution. what i have heard is that the default sounds settings get changed by some application and that is what breaks the sound in flash and in some other programs. when you open garageband it resets the settings therefore fixing the problem.

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: deggy on Wed, Mar 15 2006 at 8:42AM PST
I occassionally loose sound events in iChat, i will have to try this to see if it fixes that as well.

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: lucite on Wed, Mar 15 2006 at 9:23AM PST
I have a similar sound-loss problem on a non-Intel laptop. The way I fix it is by using Mplayer to play an .mpg file. After that everything is back to normal.

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: tirerim on Wed, Mar 15 2006 at 10:58AM PST
I had the same thing on my PowerMac G5; for me, the fix involved starting GarageBand and opening a new project, but did not require playing anything. I did have to reboot for it to take effect, however.

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: tatilsever on Wed, Mar 15 2006 at 11:10AM PST
When you have this problem, if you check System Preferences -> Utilities -> Audio MIDI -> Built-in Output, what is the sampling rate? Some apps inadvertently set that value to 96kHz instead of 44.2 or 48kHz, which the hardware cannot handle in most instances. Manually setting that back to the managable numbers through the pull-down menu fixes most of my problems. Of course, my aplogies, if yours is a completely different issue.

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: rebscott on Thu, Mar 16 2006 at 5:30AM PST
I ran across this problem with my Griffin Tech PowerWave sound device on my new Intel iMac. I couldn't get the PowerWave to drive my speakers. After going around in circles for a couple of weeks, I discovered, quite by accident, that if I switched, in Peak LE 5, under the Audio menu, the Sound Out setting from CoreAudio to Mac OSX Audio Hal (system), I could use the PowerWave to drive my speakers. So far, this has worked fine for all programs. I also reset my Audio Midi settings as other have indicated to a 44 or 48 sample rate.

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: AquaX on Mon, May 15 2006 at 12:50PM PDT
Success! I opened up /Applications/Utilities/Audio MIDI Setup, and checked the Properties for Built In Output. Sure enough it was set to 96KHz. I changed it to 44KHz and audio in Flash returned immediately.

Thanks for the tip :-)

(15" MacBook Pro, 10.4.6)

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: macworks on Wed, Mar 15 2006 at 2:49PM PST
I had some issues with no sounds in iChat and found that if I opened Activity Monitor and forced CoreAudio (coreaudiod) to quit, that fixed my problem. Perhaps that's the solution here.

NOTE: CoreAudio will automatically restart and forcing it to quit doesn't seem to cause any crashing of any running programs including iTunes while playing music.

---
Christopher Raymond, MacWorks owner/operator


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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: Mr. H on Thu, Mar 16 2006 at 3:28PM PST
As others have hinted at, the original hint works because Garage Band makes alterations to your mac's sound settings. However, there is no need to use Garage Band.

The application "Audio Midi Setup", found in /applications/utilities/ can be used to re-set the audio system to the default: 16 bits and 44.1 kHz sample rate.

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: MrMojo on Thu, Mar 23 2006 at 11:35AM PST
I want to confirm that Harry's suggestion did the trick on my G5 iMac. If it wasn't for DEVONagent I may have never found the problem to this perplexing problem!

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: MrMojo on Thu, Mar 23 2006 at 11:37AM PST
I want to confirm that Harry's suggestion did the trick on my G5 iMac. If it wasn't for DEVONagent I may have never found the problem to this perplexing problem!

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs (Quicktime too)
Authored by: ether on Wed, Jun 14 2006 at 1:30PM PDT
This fix also worked for me on my MBP 10.4.6, where I had no sound in Quicktime (MPEG files).

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: morespace54 on Thu, Jun 15 2006 at 8:44AM PDT
I had the same problem (on PPC, at least) but for QT and VLC movies... I did the "midi setting" trick and everything went back to normal... Until the problem happened again...and again...

Anybody had this problem comming back?

I hope I won't have to do this every week even if it's not such a big deal. (Hopefully 10.4.7 will fix this)

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: ddrmaniac300 on Sun, Jun 18 2006 at 12:52AM PDT
thanks, this fix worked really well. the strange thing was, though, that when this happens to me, the output switches to my usb headset, and so i unplugged my headset and restarted, but that didn't change the output back to my speakers, so i found this fix. oh well... hopefully this won't be a problem for me anymore, it happened once before, but it came back on it's own (so i thought at the time...)

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: kevlar on Thu, Jun 29 2006 at 4:27PM PDT
Finding this made my day! Thanks. I had tried all kinds of things to reinstall or just thwack sound-related things, but launching GarageBand hadn't occurred to me. But it worked.

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: kevlar on Thu, Jun 29 2006 at 4:29PM PDT
BTW, this was on a 1.67 GHz PowerBook G4 running 10.4.7.

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: debz on Sun, Jul 23 2006 at 8:01AM PDT
WCityMike, I love you so much lol thanks a lot for the tips, it works for me :)

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: mike meurin on Thu, Aug 24 2006 at 8:20AM PDT
hey there,
perhaps you can offer some insight---i am using a g4 867 dual processor.
as well, have flash 9 installed. mac osx 10.4.1. mozilla 1.5 and safari 2.0.
have uninstalled flash reinstalled it and confirmed it works. i went to itunes and it works, went to apple trailers and i get audio, but then when i go to our site www.mileendrecords.com or my space or anything else i get no audio through net sites. please help!

best,
mike

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: shelberta on Mon, Oct 16 2006 at 1:48PM PDT
worked on my imac g5. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: erikheerlein on Wed, Nov 1 2006 at 7:11PM PST
Other suggestions didn't work for me but I went to charlierose.com and just by accident I clicked on one of the google videos of his show, thus creating a yellow highlight indicating the video was selected. I then hit the tab button and various parts of the controller were highlighted in much the same way as a form would.

When I got the play button highlighted I hit the enter key and the video played and I had sound. Before that, no sound in Flash movies.

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: thoushall on Mon, Nov 27 2006 at 1:31PM PST
Why does this work anyway? Very odd fix indeed! Works though, useful tip.

BTW, how the hell did someone figure this out? hehe, thanks again!

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: iashido on Sat, Jun 9 2007 at 12:26AM PDT
This also works on PPC 17 powerbooks. I fix my problem from a dashboard widget (piano i guess / any object that generate sounds)

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Also, see this hint
Authored by: noworryz on Sat, Jun 30 2007 at 1:05PM PDT

See the comments for this later hint for more ideas:

Flash audio broken? Try Garage Band!

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: pyc926 on Thu, Jul 5 2007 at 9:18PM PDT
It works!!! That's very strange!

Thank you so much for the hint! :-)

-Melody

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: ericstandlee on Fri, Aug 24 2007 at 2:05PM PDT
Thanks for putting me in the right direction. I too had lost flash audio on my PPC mac mini. It had actually got stuck on a usb audio device I no longer had installed. I went into garage band and in the audio preferences I changed it back to built in audio. THAT DID IT.

THANKS!

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A possible fix for no sound in Flash on Intel Macs
Authored by: romesh on Wed, Apr 22 2009 at 5:02AM PDT
To revive an old topic, I just had a similar problem on Leopard 10.5.6 where flash audio refused to play through a USB headset, even though it worked fine with the internal speakers or headphones using the 3.5mm jack. As well, iTunes played back sound with much less bass than usual, again with the USB headset. Tried reinstalling flash, but this had no effect. Opened Garageband, played a couple of notes, and everything was instantly back to normal, *including* the iTunes problem

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