Hi, firstly, thanks for your work on this module Colin (and others?) It's just what I'm needing for my latest site.

I'm not certain what level of details I'm expected to go into when submitting an issue, but I'll layout the basics initially.

Only 3 audio files have been uploaded so far - 2 mp3 files and a WMA file. All 3 are playable in IE on both my home and work computers. (Obviously the flash player only appears for the 2 mp3 files...). Oh also, the 3 files are all complete as far as I know (eg I can see 3 x 7mb(ish) audio files in my audio file storage area for my Drupal site.

In Firefox however, while the play button is visible for the 2 mp3 files, when clicked it plays about half a second of audio before cutting out, and after a moment returns to showing the play button once more... (and remains in stopped mode).

One interesting (and important?) point is that I'm *almost* 100% certain that when I'd uploaded the first audio file (my own mp3), it was playable in all browsers... is it possible that on of the additional files uploaded since has caused this issue to emerge, effecting the playback of ALL the audio files via the flash player??

I've read and searched, and saw the mention of such things as the issue with bitrate etc, but I'm not sure they apply to me, as the files still play perfectly in IE....

Any suggestions?

Comments

Geary’s picture

Geary commented

Your music plays fine here, on two different machines running Firefox. One has Flash 7, the other Flash 8. What version of Flash do you have installed in Firefox? (Right-click one of your play buttons to find out.)

mediafrenzy’s picture

mediafrenzy commented

Thanks for the testing.

I have Flash 8, and just successfully played the Chamillion track, but then when i tried playing The Haunting, the problem came back, and now i'm unable to hear more than half a second of audio of EITHER track...

Colin Brumelle’s picture

Colin Brumelle commented
Assigned: Unassigned » Colin Brumelle

Did you get your problem sorted out? All audio tracks seem to work for me in firefox on mac and PC.
Nice site, by the way!

mediafrenzy’s picture

mediafrenzy commented

Thanks very much! Its all been a rather steep learning curve, being my first database/CMS/drupal powered site.

Unfortunately I'm still encountering the problem with firefox on both my home and work machines. Both machines have different setups, one is win2000pro and one is winXP, both using latest version of firefox and Flash 8 plugin.

As I mentioned earlier the problem seems to appear when I try playing a file, and move onto playing another file. If it was only happening on one of my machines I'd be a bit happier, but the fact that its happening for me on 2 different setups is a bit worrying.

mediafrenzy’s picture

mediafrenzy commented

Just thought I'd mention also, that the Firefox/flashmp3 problem only seems to appear on the audio summary pages - not the individual audio nodes. Eg, I'm able to go into each audio files individual page, and click the play button, and it plays fine - but sometimes when I'm in the overall audio summary page, and click the play buttons for those very same tracks, it'll do the weird half second audio thing...

Ludwig’s picture

Ludwig commented
Component: User interface » Miscellaneous

http://www.k9effects.com/?q=image/tid/17

Does the same to us i.e. plays a few seconds and then dies.
Any ideas?

mediafrenzy’s picture

mediafrenzy commented

Important to see that it's not isolated then...

I've personally seen it happen on 2 machines , win2k/firefox and winxp/firefox. (both version 1.07 of firefox)

Unfortunately I have no idea how to resolve this. :(

mediafrenzy’s picture

mediafrenzy commented

Oh, one thing I noticed was that while my error causes half-second momentary audio before stopping, your's lasts a few seconds... so slightly different times happening. This might be a clue as to whats happening? (beats me though!)

Ludwig’s picture

Ludwig commented

We are a bit new to this game so excuse our stupidity:-)
The files work fine
for both:
www.k9effects.com/?q=image/tid/16
and
www.k9effects.com/?q=audio/
If, and only if, we play them on the server. A Mac G4/500 with 512mgRam, Apache 2 etc
Anything online....it does the old "play a few seconds then die" game:-(
Our other Machines are another Mac G4/500 and PowerbookG4 all systems are MacOSX 10.4.3.
Does that provide any clues?

Ludwig’s picture

Ludwig commented

It is "FIXED" for www.k9effects.com/
It appears that on our configuration at least, which is MacOSX 10.4.3 and Firefox
Flash 8 is REQUIRED!
It probably is for lots of other configurations as our testers were having troubles too.
We installed Flash 8 Player for our browsers (Firefox) and it now all seems to work:-)

Thanks to everyone for clues and comments.

Ludwig’s picture

Ludwig commented
Title: Flash player and firefox not working correctly » Flash player and firefox STILL not working correctly

Whoops!
Sorry about that!
But it is NOT fixed. I had in fact clicked on the wrong window (local rather than server version).
So we still have the same old problem and less hair.
The site is now live even though it's broken.
Bad form but....

Colin Brumelle’s picture

Colin Brumelle commented

Woops! Darn. I could get it to work on my mac (with flash 7) and I find it 'unsettling' that people have had trouble with this. I think the problem with this does lie in the flash player (and perhaps encoding issues which I know are flakey with flash. Flash can only handle files with a bitrate of 44khz, for example) One way to check this is to go to the URL http://yoursite.com/audio/play/ (where is swapped with the actual node id of an audio node of course). This is the URL that is fed to the flash player. By typing this in directly, the file will play in the browser, bypassing flash all together. If the file plays all the way through here, I think it's fair to point the finger at the flash player.

Thanks for all your perseverance on this.

Colin Brumelle’s picture

Colin Brumelle commented

OK,

When I go to http://www.k9effects.com/?q=audio/play/109
It DOESN'T play all the way through. This leads me to believe that there is something wrong with the 'audio_play' function in the audio.module

I am lookng at this tonight.

You can skype me at cbrumelle if you want

Colin Brumelle’s picture

Colin Brumelle commented

OK,

Sorry for the many confusing posts here, but it looks like the above URL is playing all the way through (I didn't realise that the complete clip was only 5 secs long!). When I download the clip to my local machine by going to:
http://www.k9effects.com/?q=audio/download/109 I get the whole clip as well. Ludwig, are the clips supposed to be 5 secs long?

I have a new (totally unsubstantiated) theory that these problems might be caused by lack of bandwidth. Could it be that if bandwidth is low, the flash player doesn't handle buffering very well, has trouble receiving the audio stream, and dies? This might explain why some people experience the problems but not others, and why this seems to work on peoples local machines but not over the internet. I don't know why this would work in Explorer though, and not in Firefox, so the theory still needs some revision =)

Thoughts anyone?

Ludwig’s picture

Ludwig commented

The files are all fairly small - they are not songs, just little samples to show the chartacteristics of the effects pedals.

All are less than 700kb.
All the files are between 10 and 30secs long.

The file that you had in the previous message was not all of that file.
That file should have been 00'15 long at 369k.
Bit rate 192kbps
Sample rate 44.10kHz

You (Colin) suggested it should have a bitrate of 44khz? But I assume you meant a sample rate of 44khz or else how does that translate to a bitrate (kbps).

Hope that gives more clues - and thanks for sticking with it!

Colin Brumelle’s picture

Colin Brumelle commented

So it turns out that Ludwigs problem was a server configuration issue, and had nothing to do with the audio.module. But it does seem that mediafrenzy is still experiencing problems (all though I can't seem to duplicate them).

Ludwig’s picture

Ludwig commented

So as it turns out my problem is not an audio.module problem but a server configuration issue. Now all I need is someone as gracious and helpful as Colin Brumelle who knows their way around Apache 2 on Mac OSX :-)

In a nutshell: when calling mp3's off the server through HTTP only a small portion of the file is downloaded and played.(64k usually up to 68 kb) When downloading pdf's off the server through HTTP only 64kb of the file is downloaded . The result the same when you call the file initially whether you call it with or without php being involved in the process however, with the mp3s at any rate, if you call the file through straight HTTP a number of times it will eventually call and play the whole file.

Even a few clues as to where to look in Apache could be enough...

Thanks again Colin.

Ludwig’s picture

Ludwig commented

The problem was with the Apache distro for Mac OS X 10.4
Distro 2.0.52 has an error that limited file downloads to 64k
Anyone else on Mac OS X 10.4 should update to Apache 2.0.55!!!!!

drewish’s picture

drewish commented
Status: Active » Fixed
Anonymous’s picture

(not verified) commented
Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)
mediafrenzy’s picture

mediafrenzy commented
Issue summary: View changes

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