Help us keep the music alive.

March 12, 2008 11:40 AM

I work for an online radio site, and we're noticing that users with a particular combo of user agents have been complaining that the music is skipping/stopping-starting/not playing smoothly. Can you help us get to the bottom of this?

The combo of user agents that we're suspicious of goes like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12

flash version=9.0.47

We're not really worried about the Flash - you need Flash 9 or higher to play the music and many people do have that.

Thoughts? Hunches? (I can follow up with more details if need be.) Thanks mefi!

posted by infinityjinx to computers & internet (3 comments total)

How many users are complaining?

Does it seem to happen at a certain time of day, or randomly

Is there any way for you to correlate if the complaining users all happen to use the same ISP ? (by logging their IP's.. and doing a reverse lookup. I realize this would take some work, but it might yield interesting data)

Have you asked friends (or friends-of-the-station-employees) to do some testing for you ? (by using their own systems. Perhaps you'll find someone close that you can work with (actually sit down at the computer) and poke around and see what the problem is.

The generic suggestions I have are:
--try a different browser
--upgrade flash
--do some system maintenance (clean internet tmp files, defrag, upgrade network card drivers)
--make sure there is nothing else "resource hungry" running on the computer at the same time (bittorrent is notorious for hogging bandwidth)
posted by jmnugent at 12:08 PM on March 12, 2008

This may or may not be related, but I definitely have Flash Player 9 installed, however some sites seem unable to tell in Firefox what version of the player I've got. This could just be poor parsing of the user agent string, though.

Also, a potentially relevant data point is that I believe under Windows there's something called "Esker ActiveX Plug-in for Netscape" that is used to display the Flash Player and other ActiveX controls; perhaps this plug-in is damaged somehow or was partially broken by that specific version of Firefox.
posted by XMLicious at 12:44 PM on March 12, 2008

I think I know what you're experiencing - if you have a lot of tabs open in firefox, or it's been open for a long time, I tend to find things like youtube videos or any other flash videos will pause if they're not the 'active' tab. I don't know what to prescribe in terms of a fix, as a client I usually just close firefox down and open it up again, and it seems to work better for a while..
posted by ChefQuix at 1:39 PM on March 12, 2008