Freesound Forums

Hello there,

first and foremost: Yes, I've read the FAQ. Please allow me to continue.

This site is great and has given me many hours of relaxing background noise. Unfortunately I can't really use it right now. Since a few months my distribution no longer installs Flash by default, and I decided to keep it that way for various reasons, which, I think, don't really need to be repeated here (security, stability, performance, etc.). I can't underpin this with hard numbers, but I'm very sure that I'm only one among many people who made the same decision or didn't get a choice in the first place, especially in the Linux and Mac world. Flash isn't even available on some modern platforms, most notably mobile phones.

I'm asking you to provide an HTML 5 alternative for people like me. There are existing open source players out there, and it doesn't have to look as fancy as the Flash-based one. All I really need is a working player that can make noise and perhaps also allows me to seek, nothing else really.

Let me repeat this: It doesn't have to be pretty right now. It's easy enough to perform client-side detection whether Flash is installed (you're already using swfobject). And if not, you could just load an HTML 5 alternative. And once you have that, it's not a long way to render into a canvas and get rid of Flash altogether.

If you came this far, thanks for paying attention.

Ertugrul

I have belligerently refused to install Flash for the past four years for much the same reasons as you have decided to boycott it, so I quite understand.

However, the Freesound player works just fine and dandy for me, so as far as I can tell, there already is a non-Flash version.

Is there another reason why your browser might not be selecting the non-Flash player? Do you have JavaScript disabled?

However, the Freesound player works just fine and dandy for me, so as far as I can tell, there already is a non-Flash version.

Is there another reason why your browser might not be selecting the non-Flash player? Do you have JavaScript disabled?

I have Firefox 32 with Ghostery and NoScript installed. I tried whitelisting the usual CDNs without success. Just now I tried disabling both extensions altogether and still don't get a player. I'm not sure how/why it works for you, but the FAQ strongly suggests that you need Flash for playback.

Hi. Freesound uses Soundmanager2, in theory it seamlessly switches between html5 audio and flash. If you don't have flash, it should still work. If it doesn't, maybe there is some problem. Note that the visualization is html already, so the flash/html switch only involves sound playback.

gerard

It's probably NoScript causing the problem, though I can't say with certainty. On a platform where I use it, I'm continually having to go through multiple "Allow ...." steps on some pages in order to get things to work, and one of the weaknesses of NoScript is the way you have to do this rather incrementally. You get certain things allowed first, then they in turn load others, and each successive generation of inclusion requires yet more allowances. Rather annoying, but I'm sure coming up with a solution for that would be rather difficult. So for example, if you just click "Temporarily Allow All on This Page", that might not be enough, and you might have to do this several times.

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Keith W. Blackwell

After some research the reason seems to be that Firefox does not support MP3 playback in the desktop version, apparently due to licensing issues. So I have a new feature request now.

According to the API documentation SoundManager2 provides a way to check whether playback works on the user's browser. I understand that it would probably be too much to ask to provide OGG versions for us poor Firefox users (but it would be awesome if you would!). However, a simpler solution would be to provide an easy-to-copy download link instead when you detect that the user can't play MP3 directly in the browser. I would then just pass that link to mplayer/mpv and be happy.

Weird, I can play MP3s on Freesound using Firefox on Ubuntu. Usually it’s Linux that has problems like that, not the other way round! Although, I do have the Fluendo decoder installed.

As an interim solution, the format of a Freesound sample is displayed underneath the licence, so if you notice that a sample you’re interested in is an MP3, you can right-click the download button and click ‘Copy Link Location’ to send the link to the clipboard. Not ideal, I know, but just a suggestion.

Thanks for your support and suggestions. Yes, copy-pasting links works for now. I will try installing an MP3 decoder as an addon, but hopefully that's only temporary. I believe that the previews are always in MP3 format, regardless of the original format. And all of this slowly makes me realise what a nightmare sound must be on a web page.

Previews are actually available in OGG as well, and the idea is that firefox should use those. I don't have a machine with firefox and without flash at the moment, but we'll review this configuration.

gerard

I have just verified that HTML 5 playback of OGG files works on other sites. However, apparently SoundManager2 just thinks, "oh, it's Firefox!", and insists on Flash. If OGG files are really available, then this might really just be an SM2 problem.