The last week I have been working on a Flash/Actionscript 3 project and everything worked well. The project got in an 75% finalized. Meanwhile I needed to install a software product and it crashed my Windows Vista. Saved the important data and tried to fix it without having to reinstall the whole OS and all my needed applications but no success. The inevitable has occurred – must reinstall the OS.

After re-installation I returned to my Flash/Actionscript 3 project. At a point in my development needed to delete an mp3 file but deleted the wrong one. So I wanted to add it back to the project’s library but I had a big surprise – an error occurred:

One or more files were not imported because there were problems reading them.

It was the same file that I added to the project before the windows’ crash but this time could not add it to the library. Tried all kinds of ways to add it but no success. Tried to modify its bit-rate also without success.

Started googling about the problem and found this on Adobe’s site:

Flash does not internally support MP3 files with a bitrate over 160kbps. Importing sound files over this size will cause Macromedia Flash to ask Quicktime to handle the import via Quicktime’s audio subsystem.

Although Adobe is saying that if the mp3 having a bit-rate lower than 160kbps will not be affected by this I can say that I tried to lower the bit-rate to that file and than import it in the library but didn’t work. It seems that the problem is not the bit-rate only.

Truly I didn’t reinstalled the Apple Quicktime after the crash (but had it installed before the crash). So out of my curiosity and because I wanted to get over this issue as faster as possible I installed Quicktime. And the import worked like a charm.

It seems that Flash authoring tool is – in a small measure – dependent on the system codecs.

So if you get into this problem install Quicktime and you should not have the problem anymore. If you already have Quicktime installed Adobe’s advice is to uninstall it and install the latest version by downloading it from quicktime.com.

Wish you won’t get this error.