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ok folks, I've done a bit of research into this now and I've worked out exactly what Flash MX is doing.
Here was my situation:
A site on which the user could listen to a variety of sound clips. When they pick a section the piece of music streams down. In Flash 5, when they selected a different section the first piece of music would halt downloading, allowing the second piece to take the bandwidth and stream down.
In Flash MX however, even after the movie clip has been removed from the timeline, the piece continues to be downloaded in the backgroud, it doesn't play, it doesn't have any effect on the timeline. However it hogs the bandwidth and stops anything else being loaded in until it's finished.
I've hunted around a fair bit for a solution, some way of stopping a movie/mp3 being downloaded, but I have found none.
There must be a way of doing it, otherwise it's simply not possible to implement a properly streamed site any more.
Does anyone here know of a way to sort this out?
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I've recently experimented with the load external mp3 function, and found that:
a) if you load one mp3 into a sound object, then issue the load command again, for the same object with a new mp3, the time elapsed attribute of the sound object is cumulative.
b) working this way with several large (80-100mb) mp3 files, the processor spikes to 100% capacity and memory usage by explorer shoots through the roof
have you tried destroying the sound object to halt the download?
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Destroying the sound object sounds like a good idea. How's that done?
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I'm having the same problem with the loadSound(). No matter what I try the mp3 download continues and clogs bandwidth. Here's what I've tried with no success.
1. loading a new mp3 into the sound object. Deep is right the position goes cumulative.
2. Creating a new sound object over the old.
3. Creating the sound object inside an MC and unloading the MC
4. Creating the sound object in a level and unloading a level.
Even if you leave the url with the flash embeded the mp3 file continues to download.
The only way I have found to halt the download is to close the browser or projection file.
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This sucks big time. A lot of sites that worked well in Flash 5 will now not work in in Flash MX. Kind of defeats the point of upgrading.
Does anyone know of the reason that Macromedia have done this?
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well, there's always the chance that reassigning the object reference to a scalar variable would cause flash to trash the sound object and free up the memory... I'll give that a shot next
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even if you delete the sound object, it still seems to be sucking that MP3 down -- I thought this would be a cool feature, but I soon learned that it's not at all what it's cracked up to be.
The bad thing is that Macromedia never seems to patch their products. Why exactly is that? do we have to wait till version 7 for these bugs to get worked out?
The other irratating thing about the load Sound is that there is no pause mathod -- what's up with that? They should have known that people would want to pause their mp3s
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well, pausing just needs a function that takes the amount already played, stores it in a variable, stops the object, then start again from the paused spot.
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It is annoying that the dynamic mp3 stuff isn't as good as we'd hoped. The bit that really gets to me though is that they've broken a feature that used to work.
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Tom, so is the problem the same when loading swfs?
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Yes, you get exactly the same issue, it loads the movie in full even if you replace/remove/empty the holder.
Any file loaded dynamically is forced to load in full 
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Originally posted by C4_Tom
It is annoying that the dynamic mp3 stuff isn't as good as we'd hoped. The bit that really gets to me though is that they've broken a feature that used to work.
did anyone on this thread submit this issue to:
wish-flash@macromedia.com
with steps on how to reproduce it?
mike chambers
mesh@macromedia.com
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Tom, nevermind I went and checked some of my old streaming stuff and sure enough the bandwidth started clogging up when I started to interact with the stream.
This is terrible news. We can't build to stream anymore if they don't fix it.
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Mike,
No, I've been digging around the Macromedia site looking for a place to report it.
It's a very serious problem and needs to be addressed. All flash 4 & 5 content using dynamically loaded content will be effected. Flash applications will bog down the bandwidth, and even worse if a user leaves a url with flash content for another their bandwidth will continue to lag.
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Yep, this is a massive problem.
One of the nicest things with Flash was that you could make very nice looking sites with plenty of content and have it all stream together with no loading times.
This is now not possible.
I'm sure that this is a bug and not a 'feature' that has been introduced, I can't see a positive side to it.
Does anyone know if this is a problem with FlashMX or the Flash 6 player? If it's with the player then all our Flash 5 sites will stop functioning properly too, and I can't think of anyway around it.
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Tom it's definately the player. I have two machines one with flash player 6 and the other with flash player 5. The problem only happens when running the content through the version 6 player, and it doesn't matter if the content is in version 4 or 5.
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Oh sh*t!
Plan of action anyone?
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Well I emailed the wish-list as Mike suggested, but who knows what good that will do.
I also started a thread at Macromedia Flash Forums
http://webforums.macromedia.com/flas....cfm?catid=194
I just want to know if they are aware of the problem and working to fix it. I've spent two years working on code for interactive streaming audio applications in flash, and clients expecting 85-98% coverage. What am I to tell them now, as more people get Flash MX their applications won't work right and their coverage will go down?
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Good job, hopefully there will be a reply soon.
Macromedia have now got big problems.
Say my small flash site loads in a 50MB swf, goodbye bandwidth! Hello very frustrated user.
It also means that when browsing, if you have a look on a site and see that it has a large preload time you may decide to move on. This new bug means that even after you've moved on the large site will continue to hog the bandwidth.
How did this get through beta testing!?
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How did this get through beta testing!?
Probably because the testers have broadband. I would have never come across the problem if it weren't for testing something with a dial-up and then using a bandwidth usage monitor to takea closer look on a broadband connection.
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