AudioClip.play() should (I suppose) execute immediately, just enqueuing the work for the JFXMedia Player event queue thread (if I understand the architecture correctly). In practice (as of JavaFX 2.0 EA-b25) this doesn't always work, often causing animation "freezes". To avoid the problem I had to call play() from an asynchronous Task in order to do that outside the event dispatch thread, but this shouldn't be necessary. Easy to reproduce, I can send the app if you need.