My music is playing back too fast - it sounds like Chipmunks!
By Walt on Monday, December 3 2007, 17:00 - Technical info - Permalink
Do the MP3s on your site sounding like Chip and Dale (the chipmunks) are doing covers of your favourite songs? The reason is down to how you initially encoded your songs. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.
Files encoded using 'standard' MP3 format at CONSTANT bit rate will normally play without issue, provided the sample rate is a multiple of 44.1kHz - other 'interpolating' sample rates cause Flash Player to speed up the playback.
So, how do you fix this problem? You have two choices...
IMPORTANT Update 21 Dec 07: Especially if your page lengths remain constant throughout your site in IE7: Please just go to Adobe and download the latest Flash player and this should fix get the chipmunks out of your site and give you variable page lengths back. If you downloaded the beta version (in article below) you will find a fix with instructions in comment #2 beneath this post.
You can fix it now: Sample rates of 96000, 44100, 22050 and 11025 samples/second at 8, 16 and 32 bit depth will all work fine. So if you wish to remove the chipmunks from your site you will have to re-encode the offending files using the sample rates given above with one of the constant bit rates. If you are interested there is more information about this bug available.
Adobe will fix it later: This bug will be fixed soon by the release of Flash Player Update 3 which is currently at the Beta 2 stage which will play back any MP3 sampling rate. So, no more chipmunks. Ever. But this will require all your visitors to have downloaded the soon to be released Flash update for this to work, i.e. your visitors must have the update to hear your music correctly.
So you have an option. You can re-encode your music and remove the chipmunks now, or you can wait for the fix to hit the masses.
Comments
UPDATE: Adobe have now released Flash Player 9 Update 3 which fixes this problem.For more details or to download the latest version, please visit the Adobe Website.
Please note: If you have visitors complaining about chipmunk karaoke on your site, they will also need to upgrade to the latest version of Flash.
We've just discovered that the version supplied by Adobe [Flash version 9,0,60,184] to fix the Chipmunk program has a curious side affect when viewing sites with IE7. Page lengths in IE7 do not change. This is not a problem when viewing in Firefox or Opera for example, just IE7.
This was a beta release to fix the Chipmunk problem and has subsequently been superceded by a full and functional release. So if you have problems with your page lengths in IE7 follow the instructions below:
1. Go to the following page on Adobe's site: http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/vie...
2. Click on the link [Download the Adobe Flash Player uninstaller:] in section 1 for the Windows version
3. SAVE the uninstall program to your Desktop
4. Close everything: all browsers, Messenger if you use it, all applications (just in case one of them uses Flash)
5. Go to your Desktop and run the Unistall program.
6. Restart your computer.
7. When restarted, open a web browser and go to go to http://www.adobe.com
8. Click GET FLASH PLAYER
9. Install the Flash Player
10. Check that you now have Flash Player 9,0,115,0
Your site should now be fine with pages now showing the correct lengths in IE7. You can now go back to your desktop and delete the Flash uninstaller program.
NB. If you use other web browsers on your machine, e.g. Firefox, then you will probably need to install Flash Player for those browsers; once for IE, once for all other browsers.