Songs stopping each time after two seconds. Help!

[Blooby]

My school year is starting so my time at Songcrafters has become even more precious. Each time I click on a player, it stops after two seconds. If I reload the page, it may work one in five times. I have tried Chrome, Firefox, and Explorer, and this is only this site where it occurs. It has gotten worse as of late. I am finding I have to download each song before I play them. Help! Any suggestions? I am at a loss.

Are there any otehr sites with the same player/platform I can compare to?

Blooby

[Farrell Jackson]

I've noticed something similar Blooby. Except that the songs on the new player stop at 30 to 40 seconds into it. It usually works on the 2nd try but not always.......BTW I'm having the same visual images as Bruno with the new player but it looks even different than Bruno's.   I'm running Firefox.

Farrell

[Groundy]

I had it originally with Chrome, but since I changed to Firefox all's been well.....


Alex

[64Guitars]

I have tried Chrome, Firefox, and Explorer, and this is only this site where it occurs.

Which version of Firefox and which operating system?

Have you tried switching the player to Flash?  If so, do the songs still stop?

Are there any otehr sites with the same player/platform I can compare to?

The engine for our player can be switched between HTML5 audio and Flash audio. As far as I know, all other sites use one of these engines for playing MP3 files as there is no other way.

Hook recently said that all of the songs in the Latest Songs jukebox were stopping. So I made a very simple test page using HTML5 to play the same 4 songs that were in the Latest Songs jukebox that day. I found that they still stopped early in WebKit browsers, so that pretty much proves that our jukebox is not the cause.

https://songcrafters.org/64guitars/h5audio-test.html

Then I uploaded those 4 songs to weebly.com and made a copy of the test page which played the songs hosted on weebly instead.

https://songcrafters.org/64guitars/h5audio-test-weebly.html

I found that they still stopped early in WebKit browsers, but not nearly as often as the Songcrafters version of the test page. Although the problem is much worse when the songs are hosted on Songcrafters, it still exists when the songs are hosted elsewhere, which suggests that the Songcrafters server isn't the cause of the problem, though it does seem to make it worse.


As I've said before, this problem only seems to occur with WebKit-based browsers. I have never seen it happen with Firefox (Gecko-based) in Linux. If you're using Firefox in Linux, Windows, or OS X and the songs are stopping, then I think you must have something wrong with your system. If you're using Firefox in iOS, then you will get stoppages because the iOS version of Firefox uses WebKit (as do all iOS browsers).

The problem only occurs with the HTML5 engine of the player. I have never seen it happen with the Flash engine, even in WebKit-based browsers. So the obvious solution is to use the Flash engine if you can. However, many mobile devices don't support Flash, so that may not be an option.

The stoppages occur because the browser loses the connection to the audio stream. This will occur more frequently when you're having speed issues with your internet service or when the Songcrafters server is very busy. For example, you might find that the players work more reliably at 3 in the morning when the servers aren't very busy than they do at 3 in the afternoon when there are a lot of people on the site. Also, we're on a shared server which means that, even if there's nobody currently on Songcrafters, the server could be busy if there is lots of activity on the other sites that share our server.

The problem seems to be much worse with older versions of WebKit. So you should make sure that you're using the latest version of your browser that's available. And keep your operating system up-to-date too; especially if it's iOS because WebKit is built into iOS, so to get the latest version of WebKit, you need to have the latest version of iOS.

Hopefully, this problem will eventually get fixed in a WebKit update. Until then, there's not much we can do except use Firefox or Flash. Another browser that seems to work well with our players is QupZilla. It uses the Blink engine (the same engine used by Google Chrome). I'm kind of surprised that QupZilla works since Blink is a fork of the WebCore component of WebKit and several people have been having stoppage problems in Chrome which also uses Blink. But, for me, QupZilla seems to be very reliable in terms of playing MP3s on Songcrafters. The only issue I've found is that clicking in the progress bar doesn't change the song position as it should. Instead, it stops the song and you have to click Play again to restart it. But if you avoid clicking the progress bar, QupZilla might be a good solution for some people. It's available for Linux, Windows, OS X, and several other operating systems (but not iOS).

One final suggestion: In the jukeboxes, you can download the playlist file to your computer. This is a very small file, so it downloads in seconds. Then you can open the playlist in VLC or any other media player that supports the XSPF playlist format and it should play all of the songs. Since you're using VLC rather than HTML5 or Flash, the songs should play without stopping. And you don't have to download any songs since VLC will stream them from the Songcrafters server. I've tried it a few times with VLC in Linux and it worked very well.

[64Guitars]

I'm having the same visual images as Bruno with the new player but it looks even different than Bruno's.   I'm running Firefox.

In which operating system?

[Blooby]

Thank you for chiming in. I had been switching to the flash player previously, but these last weeks, I conveniently forgot. I'm back in business. I know it's something on my end as my work computer works fine. By the way, 64, I think you're a brilliant mind. I consider myself somewhat tech savvy, but I read some of your explanations and know that I am not.

Thank you again, all.

Blooby