Mac: No audio in Flash? Trash your preferences!

I was trying to play a YouTube video on a Mac and wasn't getting any sound. After Googling around, I found that I wasn't the only one running into this problem and that the solution is to trash your Flash Player preferences under the ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia folder.

[Update] After trashing preferences, the video was still stuttering. Apparently the problem was with the Flip4Mac WMV Internet plug-in. The solution was to disable it from System Preferences.

18 Responses to “Mac: No audio in Flash? Trash your preferences!”


  1. 1 mike chambers
  2. 2 aral

    Cool, Mike — thanks for the update! :)

  3. 3 Rasmus

    The webcam in my MacBook havn’t been working in Flash applications ever since I installed the Universal Binary.

    Have anyone else experienced the same problem?

  4. 4 Oguz Asik

    Hey Aral,

    This is Oguz from Cyprus, remember me? Hakki’s buddy. I was thinking about those days,i did a web search and found this blog. Good to hear you again, even though it’s about mac flash troubles :) Take care.

  5. 5 aral

    Hey Oguz — good to hear from you! You can email me at my first-name at the name of this blog :)

  6. 6 izycrzy

    I spent a very long time trying to resolve this issue. It happened to me after using Audacity (I think). The fix? Open garage band get it to play some sound (any sound) and it somehow magically fixed my flash player. Yay.

  7. 7 WaverunnerRC

    Hey RASMUS!!!

    I have been having a similar peoblem I can’t get my webcam to work on my MacBook either. Nor can I get on to MSN, Myspace, Hotmail, and several websites.
    They just don’t load. I went to http://www.macosx.com which turns out to be a pretty cool site. They have techs that refered me to this site. but unfortunately I haven’t solution for you at this time, and I’m not up to par on all the tech that goes into this stuff yet.
    I’m hoping someone can hep me.. Oh I live in Italy and I just bought this MacBook in the States, where it wotked fine. It’s here at home that it’s not working correctly.

    Wish I could be of more help!

    Wave!

  8. 8 Gimpy05

    I have to thank this site and the post by izycrzy! I have been tearing out my hair trying to figure out why my computer would not play sound in any flash file. It turns out it was from Audacity. I followed the simple instructions of: open Garageband, create a new file, mess on the keyboard, exit Garage band. I went directly over to YouTube and now the sound works perfectly!

    THANK YOU GUYS SO MUCH!!!!

  9. 9 aral

    Glad it helped, man — you’re very welcome! :)

  10. 10 Dusan

    Any advice for Windows users?

  11. 11 Advice For Windows Users

    Dusan, in case you haven’t found a fix yet, the Windows solution can be found here:

    http://forums.techguy.org/multimedia/490867-fixed-adobe-flash-no-sound.html

  12. 12 William Rubin

    Above fixes did not work for me. Friend who is an undergrad IT student and who had spent hours making his kid brother’s Mac audio work again offered this and it worked. This is for OS-X

    1. Open Hard Drive
    2. Open “applications”
    3. Open “utilities”
    4. Open “audio MIDI setup”
    5. Select Audio Devices tab
    6. Find “Audio Output”
    7. Note that Adobe Flash has change setting to 96000.0 Hz.
    8. Reset to 44100.0 (2ch-16Bit)
    9. Back out.

  13. 13 Aral

    Thanks for sharing, William :)

  14. 14 Joe

    I can’t hear sound on any flash movie in Firefox or Safari on my Mac. I tried the Audio MIDI setup but it was set to 44100.0. I tried launching Garage Band and closing it. Trashed Flash Player prefs. I hear sound in QT movies, and QT embedded in a web page.

    Any other ideas?

    Thanks and best regards,

    -Joe

  15. 15 Maarten

    @joe:
    did you actually play some music? e.g. record a bit of piano, playback the noise, and save it to make sure?
    That did it for me…
    Good luck

    In the past apps like director could control the entire sound output on your Mac, i forgot about that.

    Thanks Aral!

    (I didn’t use audition but just gave my mac the most extreme crash ever. )

  16. 16 Kirsten

    William - Thank you so much… your solution did it. Thanks again.

  17. 17 Aral

    Happy to hear it, Kirsten :)

  18. 18 raoul

    Aral-hey man, I’ve been reading your site for a while now and have never left a comment. But, after continually coming back for flash tech help, I thought I should finally thank you for providing such great advice and a great forum for flash users. I typically use Pro Tools, but had to use audacity for a deadline project and ran into this same exact problem. When my audio vanished, I came here and found the solution in seconds. Awesome.

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