[Luca]

So, uh, Flash animations no longer play sound at all for me, and I have no clue as to why. Possible culprits include:

- I recently downloaded the standalone Macromedia Flash player application since Apple has removed Flash compatibility from QuickTime (why'd they do that anyway? I loved that!). But that is a standalone application that didn't even require a pkg installer. I just dragged it to my hard drive and even used it to play several flash animations shortly afterwards, with no problems.
- I have ShapeShifter installed. But it's been running the same for months with zero problems. I will try disabling it but I don't know why it would do this.
- Recently, for no reason at all, my computer has begun going into the screen saver after a long period of inactivity. I don't know why it does this. I don't have any hot corners assigned to anything, and the slider bar telling the screensaver when to activate is set to "Never." I don't know if this is a related problem, because it started doing this a few days before I had this problem with Flash.
- Yesterday, I did a sudo killall of the update process (and one other that was listed in the thread). The last Flash I saw that worked properly was before I did this. However, I don't see how it's related. Furthermore, I have logged out and back in, and also restarted the computer since then, with no effect. "update" is again running since I haven't killed it yet, but still no sound.
- In an attempt to fix this, I downloaded and installed the latest version of Flash player from Macromedia's website, but again, it had no effect.

Anything else I'm missing? I am really lost here.

[Stevuh]

That's really odd and that actually sounds similar to what is happening to me with WMP. For what ever reason i cannot use WMP on my PB. the plugins for safari and firefox don't work and even though i have the program in my app folder it won't open. this is happening to a couple other apps to like fireworks and dreamweaver, but since i don't use those on a regular basis i'm not really concerned about it yet. it is annoying though, Anyone have any ideas?

[Luca]

Some more information to add:

- I cleared my flash and shockwave prefs
- I cleared my computer's cache
- I repaired permissions
- I restarted (again)

No change for the better. Though now, switching between applications takes several seconds. It's very annoying. I have no idea why that is... maybe the computer's just trying to build up a cache or something, but I am extremely frustrated by how slow things are now. Some possibly relevant data:

- 78,000 pageins
- 1,600 pageouts
- 216,000 cache lookups
- 42,000 cache hits (about 20%)
- 21,000,000 page faults
- 200,000 copy-on-writes
- 1 swap file present in /var/vm/
- 1 swap file at peak usage
- 64.0 MB total swap space

I'm afraid somehow I did something when I cleared my cache. Is the huge number of page faults to blame? Or what about the swap space... don't you normally have over 1 GB of swap space?

Another thing to add is that RealPlayer also doesn't seem to play audio. The volume control in RealPlayer is definitely set to the highest and it's not muted or anything. I can hear audio from QuickTime, iTunes, iChat, various system sounds, and most other sources, but RealPlayer and Flash don't produce any audio.

Is there something else I should try?

[Brad]

When was the last time you rebooted? It only makes perfect sense to reboot after clearing all your caches, IMO.

[Luca]

Okay, restarting seems to have fixed the problem I was having with slowness. Silly me, I guess I had assumed logging out was enough, but it wasn't.

It still doesn't fix my problem of not being able to hear anything in Flash or RealPlayer though. They're just as broken as ever