Certain MP3 files not playing in Chrome

Question

I have a site which has a collection of audio clips for voice actors to promote their skills and talents. Recently it has been brought to my attention that in Google Chrome some of the clips do not play. However you can download the .mp3 and it will play fine, or you can listen to it fine in Firefox, Safari, IE, etc.

So I started Googling and found this bug which was closed a couple of years ago: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=110309

I also found this page: http://cro.ma/?faqs=some-of-my-mp3-files-does-not-play-in-google-chrome-browser-but-works-fine-in-all-other-browsers

The MP3 in question is fairly short 10s in playtime, and only 168kb in size. It did have some meta information there but as recommended in the link I stripped that off, however it still doesn't play.

The only other difference I have noticed between the non-working MP3 and the working MP3s is that the non-working one has a bit rate of 112kbps, whereas the working ones are 128kbps.

The site uses MediaElement.js but even just dragging the MP3 into the browser window and using the default engine has the same outcome.

Has anyone else experienced this issue and know of a fix?

Answer 1

It's a problem with version 45 of Google Chrome. Joshua Moon has provided the following solution which may help you, all credits go to him. Just posting as your question was asked after his and I thought you might not have seen it.

Joshua said:

I'm not 100% on the specifics of this, however, it looks like some MP3s using older versions of Lame, or longer than a couple of minutes, or at high (300 <) or low (128 >=) bitrates seem to be affected. It appears to be webkit-related, as it also affects Safari users.

HOWEVER!

As a solution, re-encoding the MP3 files using 160Kbps bitrate, and the latest version of LAME (3.99.5) seems to have fixed this, and they now play normally across all major browsers again.

You can see the full question and answers here (on Stack Overflow): Google Chrome no longer plays certain audio files

Answer 2

I had this problem today on Chrome 50 and simply restarting my browser got it working again.

Answer 3

Based on other's comments I installed "Audio Converter" and converted my mp3 files to 128 Kbps (standard) and they now work. I don't find any loss of quality.