Irv Kalb writes with an update to a vexing problem he’d had with a Flash sprite not playing its sound (so what else is new?)
If you remember, for reasons of supporting Windows 98, I have a Flash Audio Player which is a very small Flash swf to play mp3 sounds. Under undefined strange circumstances, it would not initialize correctly.
I won’t get into the gory details, but Markie (Castle) and I tracked it down late one night. The problem turned out to be that I had the Flash Audio player on stage (it was just a blank 16 by 16 pixel square), in channel 1, and I had a large graphic covering the entire stage in channel 2. The real culprit is that the Flash sprite must be visible for it to allow itself to be initialized correctly!
First, we just moved it to channel 3 so it was on top of the graphic. It worked perfectly – but I had this white square over my graphic. So, Markie suggested that I make it “Direct To Stage” (apparently that had defaulted to off) AND move it off stage. After doing that everything works perfectly. I wound up putting it back into channel 1 but still off screen, but since it’s Direct To Stage, Flash thinks that it is visible and initializes correctly. Bogus, bogus, bogus.
I haven’t double-checked this myself, but Irv writes that he’s shipping version 1 of his product.