Why would an MP3 play in Safari but not Chrome?

Question

I've tried playing an MP3 on two MacBooks in Google Chrome and have had no luck in playing it in the browser; I have no issues in Safari. In Chrome, the audio player controls load, but the actual audio file never loads. Looking at the HTTP requests/responses, I noticed that the MP3 returns a 200, 206, and a final 200 code in Chrome. In Safari, I just get a single 200.

An important point is that none of the MP3s served from this site load or play in Chrome. I have no problem playing MP3s from other sites.

Again, this is the MP3: http://nyc.podcast.play.it/media/d0/d0/d0/dW/dT/d7/d5/WT75_3.MP3

Answer 1

We had a similar problem on a MP3 file playing in Safari, but not under Chrome (10).

Interesting enough, the solution was, believe it or not, in the time stamp of the file, which was in future (due to our recording script) for files being not playable for Chrome. So as soon as we modified the time stamp on the MP3 to the current/past time the MP3 file played well in Chrome as well.

Tools at hand, curl:

$ curl -I http://x.y.z.42/mp3files/2011/4/9/foo-h13.mp3
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 09 Apr 2011 15:39:48 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.9 (Debian) PHP/5.2.6-1+lenny9 with Suhosin-Patch
Last-Modified: Sat, 09 Apr 2011 15:39:48 GMT
ETag: W/"c7a00c9-1b77609-4a082a5de8441"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 28800521
Content-Type: audio/mpeg

... and to check the validity of the MP3 file (mp3check, part of Debian package directory):

$ mp3check -a foo-h13.mp3
foo-h13.mp3:
anomaly: audio mpeg version 2.0 stream
anomaly: sampling rate 22.1kHz
anomaly: bitrate  64kbit/s
anomaly: mode single chann
anomaly: no crc

Answer 2

Have you tried downloading and then listening to the MP3? If that works the issue could very well be related to the plug-in you're using to play MP3 files might need to be reinstalled.

Answer 3

I have mp3s playing fine in Chrome 9 on OSX 10.6.6. My code is:

<audio preload="metadata" src="http://example.com/example.mp3"></audio>

You could also try preload="auto". By the way, I use jPlayer as it provides an automatic Flash fallback (which isn't used in this example on Chrome).

@Jeff, you are mistaken. Safari, Chrome and IE9 play mp3s natively. See: http://html5doctor.com/native-audio-in-the-browser/