Music Looping in AS3
According to the AS3 documentation you can loop a sound by passing in a loop number argument when you call play on a sound. Apparently, that never seems to work consistently for me. Sometimes it would not loop after a number of times, or it doesn’t loop immediately. So I usually just manually control the looping of music with Event Listeners.
To do this, I add an Event Listener to the music channel that will call a function to replay the sound whenever it’s done playing once.
public function playMusic():void
{
musicChannel = music.play();
musicChannel.addEventListener(Event.SOUND_COMPLETE, loopMusic);
}
public function loopMusic(e:Event):void
{
if (musicChannel != null)
{
musicChannel.removeEventListener(Event.SOUND_COMPLETE, loopBackgroundMusic);
playMusic();
}
}
So the sound will continue to loop forever until I stop it. Whenever I do, I have to remove the Event Listener from the music channel or else it won’t be garbage collected.
public static function stopMusic():void
{
if (musicChannel != null)
{
musicChannel.stop();
musicChannel.removeEventListener(Event.SOUND_COMPLETE, loopMusic);
}
}
That’s about it. A pretty simple solution to an annoying problem sometimes.
Tags: actionscript 3, programming
February 25th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
cool thanks, although i think:
musicChannel.removeEventListener(Event.SOUND_COMPLETE, loopBackgroundMusic);
should be:
musicChannel.removeEventListener(Event.SOUND_COMPLETE, loopMusic);
May 8th, 2008 at 7:24 am
i’m sry, but wat is that musicChannel != null checking?
June 24th, 2008 at 5:50 am
[...] or twice. Again I went around reading on codes.. And found I wasn’t alone. Then I came across a simpler workaround using functions call, better than the former [...]
June 24th, 2008 at 11:11 am
I’ve used the the same methods as thise described above several times. A simpler way to achieve the same thing is to use the following:
musicChannel = music.play(0, int.MAX_VALUE);
This basically takes the maxium integer value available in AS3 as the second param. It should be sufficient enough for most use cases.
August 10th, 2008 at 2:15 am
Thanks man, i’ve been searchin for something like this simple musicChannel = music.play(0, int.MAX_VALUE);
October 17th, 2008 at 4:27 am
I think you can get around having to remove the listeners every time by using weak references, detailed here:
http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2006/07/as3_weakly_refe.html
I’ve not tried it, but it sounds like what you’re after – weak references don’t stop something being garbage collected.
Loved Zunderfury, by the way!
November 26th, 2008 at 9:50 am
@Ruth the != null is there to prevent an exception being thrown if you try to delete something that is null already
March 1st, 2009 at 11:19 am
[...] To loop a sound clip in Flash using ActionScript 3 refer to – http://doogog.com/music-looping-in-as3.html [...]
May 1st, 2009 at 10:32 am
Hey, I used a really simple method to loop sound.
function playSound(event:Event):void
{
myChannel = mySound.play();
myChannel.addEventListener(Event.SOUND_COMPLETE, playSound);
}
As for only looping it a certain amount of times…you could just keep duplicating this function but changing the names for however many times you want it to loop. (playSound1, playSound2, playSound3, etc…) Then just redirect each function to the next one on SOUND_COMPLETE.
July 17th, 2010 at 2:04 pm
Thanks a lot for this solution
Love the way and now always use it to control my music!
August 7th, 2010 at 9:44 pm
Hey I like your solution Alex!
November 2nd, 2010 at 7:08 pm
@alex It’s a good idea, but you forgot to remove the event listener before adding it again. Each playback will add another event listener. After 3 loops, it will have 6 event listeners attached to it, growing exponentially.
December 17th, 2010 at 6:45 pm
@peter:
or you could use a FOR?
April 9th, 2011 at 8:16 pm
Hi i’m new to as3, i try the code, there’s no error but my music just won’t loop…did i miss something that’s not written here?
July 21st, 2011 at 10:49 pm
if you add a listener, use it !
function loopMusic(e:Event):void
{
soundChannel.removeEventListener(Event.SOUND_COMPLETE, loopMusic);
soundChannel = sound.play();
soundChannel.addEventListener(Event.SOUND_COMPLETE, loopMusic);
}