HTML5 MP3 player request March 5, 2011 10:08 AM   Subscribe

Pony Request: Adding an HTML5 MP3 player to the Music subsite.

This is a suggestion to add a way to listen to work on the Music subsite from devices that do not have Flash support, or which have disabled Flash. There are several open-sourced MP3 players out there (example). If there isn't enough demand for it or it's too difficult to work into the current setup, no problem, just a suggestion. Thanks for reading.
posted by Blazecock Pileon to Feature Requests at 10:08 AM (15 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite

Done!
posted by pb (staff) at 10:15 AM on March 5, 2011 [3 favorites]


Very nice — thank you!
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:16 AM on March 5, 2011


The current music player is HTML5, with a Flash fallback. We're using jPlayer. We only serve MP3s here, so you might check for HTML5 audio compatibility for your browser to see which version of the player you'll get.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:17 AM on March 5, 2011


For example, Firefox will always get the Flash version because Firefox doesn't support playing MP3s natively. This article has a nice table that shows support: Native Audio in the browser. Scroll down to "Codec support in modern desktop browsers".
posted by pb (staff) at 10:23 AM on March 5, 2011 [2 favorites]


I considered making a fourth MeTa post, asking for a literal pony, like a nice Connemara with a lustrous coat. Not mocking the three Saturday morning pony requests we've already had, just continuing the chain, uninterrupted. But then I saw how diligently the pb and the other mods had been responding to all these things, well before I woke my drunk ass up (in a PST time zone location) and thought better of it
posted by cobra_high_tigers at 10:31 AM on March 5, 2011 [1 favorite]


Does this mean we can have play/download counts again?
posted by dunkadunc at 10:37 AM on March 5, 2011


pb is granting wishes today, pass it on.
posted by The Whelk at 11:09 AM on March 5, 2011


Seven minutes from request to done? Well, it's Saturday - I guess pb's entitled to take it easy today.
posted by rtha at 11:41 AM on March 5, 2011 [4 favorites]


Thank you. I just listened to "Punch 'Em in the Dick" on my IPad, I am truly living in the future.
posted by Ad hominem at 12:32 PM on March 5, 2011 [5 favorites]


I wish for a million wishes.

But I'm just gonna use every one of those wishes on signed photos of actor LeVar Burton.
posted by arto at 1:23 PM on March 5, 2011 [3 favorites]


thanks pb!


Sent from my ipad2
posted by special-k at 1:27 PM on March 5, 2011 [1 favorite]


pb is from the future.
posted by -t at 2:07 PM on March 5, 2011


Playing doesn't work in my Safari Version 5.0.3 (6533.19.4) on latest version of Snow Leopard. I click play and nothing happens, but if I click in the scrubber to go to another time, then playback does start.

Working fine in Chrome, however.
posted by Space Coyote at 4:28 PM on March 5, 2011


I see what you mean about Safari 5.0.3 Space Coyote, but only for some tracks. The top track on Music right now has this behavior, but the next one doesn't. There are no obvious errors. This one is going to be fun to track down.
posted by pb (staff) at 5:06 PM on March 5, 2011


ok, after looking at this for a while I'm fairly certain this is a bug with certain MP3 encodings in Safari. If you load the problem MP3s directly in the browser, you'll get the exact same behavior with the native Safari MP3 player. Other people have noted the problem in the jPlayer forums, and it was fixed by re-encoding the files.

We don't have the luxury of forcing a specific type of MP3 encoding, so I'm forcing the Flash version of the player for desktop Safari until this problem is fixed. I'm not thrilled with this option, but we need the player to work reliably in Safari and ironically Flash is the way to do that. Thanks again for the heads up, Space Coyote.
posted by pb (staff) at 8:20 PM on March 5, 2011


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