Issues With Adobe Flash Player

On our Music page, I've installed a flash-based MP3 player applet. If you've got a fairly recent version of Adobe Flash installed, you should see a small "play" button next to each song title. Clicking on one of the play buttons is intended to play a sample of the song right there in the web browser.

I discovered a bug in certain versions of the Flash Player plugin that prevented the song clips from playing, and I've implemented a work-around. If you happen to be running a specific combination of operating system, browser, and Flash version, then the song clips won't play directly in the browser. In those cases, you should still see a play button, but the button will download an MP3 song clip that plays in a separate media player program, rather than playing right there in the browser.

Quick Work Arounds

If you're still having trouble playing the song samples, here are some different things you can try:

• Easiest and fastest: Make sure you have the latest Adobe Flash. The problem I discovered was only with version 9 of flash, on non-IE browsers, on Windows.
• If you want to use Firefox to listen to the samples directly in the web browser rather than downloading them, you have to upgrade to a version of Flash that is not 9.0.115.0 or 9.0.124.0. Please note that builds 115 and earlier are vulnerable to known security bugs, so downgrading is not recommended. To find your flash version, right click on any Flash applet and select the "About" menu. At the time I discovered the bug, Flash version 9.0.124.0 was the latest official version, but now you can get version 10 or later, which fixes the problem.
• If you get the play button, and when you click on it, it changes to a square instead of a spinning "loading" icon, then it's actually working OK and your only problem is that your volume is turned down or muted. See if you get sound in YouTube videos and similar Flash applications.
• If you get blank spaces on the page where the play buttons should be, even though you're sure you've installed a recent version of Flash, then the problem is most likely a bug in the Adblock plugin for Firefox, or some similar plugin. Disable the plugin, switch to Adblock Plus, or just use IE to browse the samples.
• If you're trying to play our complete streaming album at last.fm, and there's a blank space on the page where the player applet should be, and/or you get the error "Firefox doesn't know how to open this address, because the protocol (lastfm) isn't associated with any program", then the problem is most likely a bug in the Adblock plugin for Firefox, or some similar plugin. Disable the plugin, switch to Adblock Plus, or just use IE to listen to the album.

I'm hoping that my MP3-download work-around is working for everyone. If you still can't get the clips to play, please let me know by responding to my Livejournal thread about it. List the browser, operating system, and the version of Flash you're using, and describe the behavior you're seeing.

If you're technically inclined, and you want to know more about this problem, here are the details I know about this bug. This was submitted to Adobe via their bug reporting system. If you've got information about this that you'd like to share, please respond to my Livejournal thread about it with any information and insights you care to offer.

I spent days trying different Flash Player applets out. They all exhibited the same or similar symptoms. So it's not the applets, these are all Flash applets that have been around for a long time, they have all been tested and used on many different popular web sites, and they all work the same way. They all pretty much do the same thing and call the same functions within Flash.

Bug Description

All of the applets I tried, failed when faced with this particular combination, and failed in the same way:

• OS: Windows (XP or Vista).
• Browser: Recent versions of Windows Firefox, Windows Opera or Windows Safari.
• Flash Plugin Version: 9.0.115.0 or 9.0.124.0 only.
• The resulting bad behavior is: Flash applet looks like it's going to work, but instead of playing the MP3 file, sits on the "loading" animation and never plays. In the case of the XPSF applet that I use, the loading animation is a circle of dots that cycles clockwise. This animation never changes to the desired "square" icon, which would indicate it was playing the song.
• IMPORTANT: The page must have more than approximately 16-20 of the same Flash player object on the same page. 13 objects and it's fine, 14-16, maybe a problem, 20 and up, definitely problem every time.

The applets always work perfectly in the following conditions:

• MacOS X always works, even with Firefox and with the latest Flash version.
• Internet Explorer always works regardless of OS or Flash version.
• Fewer than 14 applets on the page always works, regardless of OS or Flash version.
• Flash Version 9.0.47.0 or earlier always works, regardless of the number of objects on the page.

Bug Demonstration Files

Please Click Here to see a set of pages that demonstrates the problem consistently on all of my Windows Firefox systems with 9.0.124.0 of Flash installed.

More Details

So it's clearly something Adobe changed after version 9.0.47.0, and it's something that breaks almost every quick-and-dirty little MP3 player out there in this strange and specific way. There are some that it doesn't break, though. For example, the little play buttons on Jonathan Coulton's Music Page, which use the del.icio.us mp3 player, work because they only implement a single Flash object on the screen and use Javascript code to feed individual MP3 links to it. The Flash bug I'm talking about only comes up when you put more than 15 Flash objects on the screen simultaneously.

Incidentally, the player applet I'm using right now is Fabricio Zuardi's XSPF Player, the "Music Player Button" version. I've looked at a few other player applets and of the ones I tried, they all failed in some way based on the parameters I've described above.

Most notably, I have tried the player that CDBaby uses, which is the Wimpy Player button, which is a commercial for-pay applet. The Wimpy player fails identically to the XPSF player, based on the parameters I described above. To prove it, you have to find a page on CDBaby with more than 15 songs that have active "play" buttons on the page, such as this one, and compare it with a page that has fewer than 14 songs, such as our page.

Details of My Work-Around

I'm currently using Javascript to check and see which browser and flash version is running. If it's IE, I do nothing. If it's non-IE, I look for whether or not Flash is installed and check the flash version. If Flash isn't installed, or if it's one of the known-bad versions running under Windows, then I hide all of the Flash player buttons and show the direct-download buttons.

Hopefully this is working for more or less everyone, and gives everyone a chance to hear the song clips. I could envision some odd situations where it might not work, but they all involve very old browsers, very old versions of Flash, or important browser features such as Javascript disabled. I'm hoping that if you're surfing the web and expecting to play multimedia content, you're probably using a new enough browser, and wouldn't do things like cripple your browser and then blame me for it. If you still can't get the clips to play, please let me know by responding to my Livejournal thread about it. Report the browser, operating system, the version of Flash you're using, and the behavior you're seeing.

Thanks for your patience!

- Tony

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