Is there a workaround for the microsoft jvm memory leak for playing audioclips or is the only option to just not play sounds when that JVM is being used?
Maybe you can use the sun.audio package but it’s a pain to use it and not an official api (nor documented). And chances are the MSVM uses it under the hood anyway for AudioClips…
The best option is not to use the MSVM at all 
Actually the bug was in the sun JVM’s up until I think 1.2, the reason I’m wanting to know is I’ve written a game that I didn’t see a good reason not to make an applet… or even a good reason it shouldn’t run on the MS JVM (or well, any 1.1 jvm, but other than the MS JVM I don’t think it’s likely someone will have that old of a JVM in use). Obviously I would recommend anyone using the applet to upgrade to 1.4 but I don’t want to make that a requirement.
Is there a non-pure java solution, maybe something like having the sounds embedded into the page somehow using javascript to play the files?
I haven’t researched it but I seem to recall there was something about using javascript to manipulate applets (or what I’m hoping the other way around), if that’s the case I could probably solve the problem without any obvious problems.
[quote]Is there a non-pure java solution, maybe something like having the sounds embedded into the page somehow using javascript to play the files?
[/quote]
I believe you’re referring to Netscape LiveConnect. I believe it works in both Netscape and IE. AFAIK, no other browsers support it.
Is that what you were looking for?
Did some searching and there is an object called JSObject from netscape that allows Javascript to talk to and be talked to by Java, microsoft also has an object JSObject that does the same, so I’m going to give a shot at using javascript functions to play sounds from my applet.