If you tried to listen to our music samples and got the above results, please read the following.

While trying to figure out how to add ALT TEXT to images on this site so that visually impaired guests could navigate the site, as well as so Google Bot could read the site and know what it was about, some testers found that mp3 files could not be played when the site was accessed with Safari.

After a week of extensive and painstaking troubleshooting, it was discovered that ANY mp3 created in iTunes (any version) would not play in Safari, but only under Mac OSX 10.6.x Snow Leopard.  ANY Mac under Mac OSX 10.5.x Leopard (including Intels), or earlier, was fine.

However.... the plot thickens... this issue was more specific than that... The problem with playing mp3s only occurs on WebKit enabled servers, like Apple’s Mobile Me.  Non WebKit enabled servers do not exhibit this problem - i.e. the Host Excellence servers, which hosts the site iWebForMusicians, or the Shaw servers which hosts the band’s parent company thumbprints Multimedia.  Even playing a song directly off the Desktop in Safari still works.

For example,

Chain of Fools - on Mobile Me does not play

Chain of Fools - on Shaw does play.

Thanks to iWebForMusicians’ Roddy helping me with testing of one of our songs on various servers he has access to, we discovered that tracks encoded with the LAME engine play back without any issues on Mobile Me. 

Now to confuse the issue even more, IF you access and play a song encoded with iTunes in another browser (i.e. FireFox), and (without closing the song in Firefox) play the same song in Safari (Snow Leo), the song will now play, BUT now using the Quicktime 7 plugin (if available on the system), and NOT the default Quicktime X plugin.  Firefox uses the Quicktime 7 plugin, and it appears that since Firefox has loaded the Quicktime 7 plugin, Safari sees that Quicktime is active for that file/track, and instead of launching and using the default Quicktime X plugin, Safari uses the already loaded Quicktime 7 plugin. 

Once Safari has played a song with the Quicktime 7 plugin, the plugin seems to be permanently attached to that particular song.  Any song that has not yet been previous loaded in Safari while Firefox has the track open, will still use the Quicktime X plugin, and fail.

WARNING - After a track is created by the LAME engine, if ANY modifications are made to an mp3 from within iTunes (even changing the name), the track will be made  unplayable in Safari on Snow Leopard.

Also, if that mp3 contains Track information, this will cause a load/play failure regardless of the encoder, LAME or iTunes.  So DON’T use TRACK information in songs you intend to link to on your site!

Anyway, we still do not know exactly why mp3s fail when created with iTunes, maybe it is because LAME uses ID3 Tag: v2.4, and iTunes uses ID3 Tag: v.2.2.  Whatever the case, LAME encoded mp3s seem to work dependably, even when an mp3 is loaded into Safari using the Quicktime X plugin on WebKit enabled servers.  If we find a definitive reason and cure, we will post the news here.

So, as a result, we are now using iTunes-LAME to encode all the mp3s used on this site.

If, for some reason, you still have a problem playing our tracks (on Snow Leopard or otherwise), please contact me (Gary) and let us know.

Again, many thanks to Roddy and Old Toad in the iTunes Apple Discussion forums for all the help and time spent investigating this problem.