mp3 audio works in all browsers but not IE9

Question

I have three mp3 audio files that play fine in all browsers but play for only 1.x seconds in IE9 unless I change \"controls\" to \"autoplay\" in which case it plays just fine. <

Answer 1

I was having trouble with audio controls showing on IE9 and found that IE9 struggles with the preload attribute. I didn't want the browser to preload all the files by setting them all to 'auto' but found that setting the preload setting to 'metadata' instead of 'none' did the trick. Could be an alternative solution. http://helephant.com/2011/12/29/the-html5-audio-tag/ : "Metadata suggest that the browser just download enough of the file to find out things like dimensions, running length and size."

Answer 2

EDIT: My fix didn't work. It still fails in IE9 but everything works still in every other browser.

An answer to my own question that solves the problem, at least, but I have not found out why.

I don't know why some mp3 files play just fine in IE9 but others, that also work well in any modern browser, won't play in IE9 using the markup I show above. I made audio play by adding the audio attribute preload="auto" and all is fine now in IE9.

Modern browsers do not need this. Why IE9 does, I do not know yet.

Answer 3

Ran into the same problem, audio files would only play first second when preload is set to metadata on IE9. Turns out that my API was gzip compressing all responses and IE9 was having trouble dealing with it. After removing gzip/deflate compression from audio and video files, IE9 was fine with it.

Answer 4

In case anyone is still dealing with this issue, I use the standard <audio> markup for mp3.

<audio controls="controls" preload="auto">
<source src="http://www.davehullthehullabalooer.com/help(5).mp4" type="audio/mp4"/>
<source src="http://www.davehullthehullabalooer.com/help.ogv" type="audio/ogv"/>
<source src="http://www.davehullthehullabalooer.com/help.webm" type="audio/webm"/>
<source src="http://davehullthehullabalooer.com/add-for-beatles-page-188.mp3" type="audio/mp3"/>
</audio>

In IE9: Internet options > Advanced Tab > Multimedia, I select "Play sounds in webpage"

All good!