Hi Moshe,
I don’t believe the firefox MP3 playing problem is a website issue. Seems to be quite common on the internet to have mp3 playback problems in Firefox. I’ve tested your site on my mac and windows and it works perfectly well until Firefox is involved.
Thanks for taking the time to confirm the problem.
I guess the good news is that Firefox has less than 8% of the browser market, although I have no idea how that translates into share-of-installed base.
The mystery to me is that all of the mp3 links on other pages work fine, it’s just the links on the one page. Go figure. I sent detailed “feedback” to Mozilla, but I’m not waiting breathlessly for a reply, even less for a fix.
Although I’ve been avoiding it for several years, seemingly the time has come to drop Firefox like a bad habit (as we used to say back in the day). The complication is that all of our Macs—four iMacs and four Mac laptops—run Firefox, connected by a single email address that keeps all their bookmarks, emails, etc. updated. Not looking forward to replacing everything with Chrome, even though its much more sophisticated ecosystem.
If you want those files to play back in Firefox I’d convert them to .ogg from mp3. If you were using Stacks there are various media players that can load mp3 or ogg versions of a file to serve different browsers. Not sure how you’d do it if you’re not using Stacks.
Maybe someone else can advise?
Thanks for the suggestion.
When I recreated the problem page, I did use Stacks—thinking that might make the difference, but it didn’t.
Not sure about changing the file-type to ogg. Although far from sure at this point, seems possible that changing the names and/or types of my Media files may cause a problem when setting up a Redirect to forward file requests using the old nomenclature that could come by the hundreds from different sites and address books (based on my professional work).
For the moment, given the relatively few Firefox browsers, I can live with the handicap.
Can you open the .htaccess file and add these lines to it:
AddType audio/mpeg mp3
AddType audio/mp4 m4a
AddType audio/ogg ogg oga
Then try again with Firefox.
You find the htacces in your publishing settings:
Thanks for the suggestion.
Copied and pasted the three lines to go into the .htaccess file—including the word “AddType”—but Firefox still couldn’t load the mp3 files on the problem-page (although I reloaded the page before trying).
I think this was resolved several years ago when Firefox had it’s major redesign. I have tons of mp3s on several sites and have never had a problem with getting them to work on Firefox. So I think the problem lies elsewhere.
The mp3 files on the existing site (https://www.gatherthepeople.org/) play fine for me on Firefox and infact open considerably quicker than in Safari.
Imho the current Firefox is a pretty great browser and a good alternative to Chrome, without the security issues.
As @thang David said, there were issues with Firefox playing MP3s years ago (2014ish). That if I remember had to do with licensing more than a technical issue.
The fact that some play fine on the same site (different page) tells us that it’s more than likely something about the way they’re set up.
If it was a Firefox issue or even a mime type issue they probably wouldn’t work on the other pages.
I’m on an iPad so can’t dig any deeper.
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