Flash.media.Sound & Memory Issues in Flex

Taking a short break from my module woes, I've been working with audio in Flex. In my app I was building a preview intro scan of my listed mp3's. What I noticed is that as the list of mp3's got longer, the memory that my browser was eating up got larger. I haven't really found any articles addressing best practices regarding handling audio in Flex, however I would venture a guess that this has been addressed many times in the past by Flash Developers.

I'm pretty tired so I'll keep this simple. Best way I have found to ensure that an audio stream is destroyed and the memory returned when you stop it:

      private var mySound:Sound = new Sound();
      private var audio:SoundChannel = new SoundChannel();

      private function startPlaying():void{
        mySound = new Sound(new URLRequest("music/sample.mp3"));
        mySound.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, completeSound);
        audio = mySound.play();
      }
              
      private function stopPlaying():void{
        audio.stop();
        mySound.removeEventListener(Event.COMPLETE,completeSound);
        mySound = null;
      }

Trick is to declare the variables outside the function, ensure you configure a sound channel (audio) for your sound, and make sure you that you can reference both from the stop function. Then you need to stop the audio, remove any event listeners, and set sound to null. I found it's also a good idea to do your URLRequest inline, as it seems to get destroyed at the same time as mySound.

Short, simple.