I dont know what to say.. it plays fine for me..

it makes no sense that it works depending on how you access the page at all. must be some problem with your server or your computer..

Hi,
I've asked many of my friends to check the albums and most of them said that the playback cuts off, song never finishes the whole length.

they had to refresh the page to get it to work. what am I supposed to do? this will be really annoying and bad for the site. its the most basic thing that I have to offer.

any clues?
thanks

You have the wrong durations set for some songs. The player plays all the way through to the end, but the song gets cut off.

Example, your first song has a duration set to 2:54 so that is where the player stops playing. The duration of that song should actually be something more like 3:25 You need to go into the song details and set the duration to the actual time. Unfortunately muscol doesn't use the actual mp3's duration but instead uses the duration of what the user defines. So if you use something like discogs api or some other info without grabbing it from the mp3 itself they won't always match.

Thanks for the reply,
The example page that I sent you has no song durations set. everything is at 0000. I have also tried manually putting in the duration and I still had the same issue.

besides refreshing the page would fix it , you know what I mean? as you mentioned you also saw 2:53 as the duration, try refreshing the page and see what happens.

looks like a bug , you know what I mean. randomly acts weird. I don,t know what to do! its pretty annoying.

I tried manually putting all the song duration for the example album. no luck.

I have to refresh the page to get the right timing. when I say I, I mean most people with all kinds of browsers. any clues on why this is happening? no one has had this issue in the past?

thanks

actually this should be the problem... many of my songs are set to 0:00 but they play entirely though..

the length that you introduce is just an extra information, JWplayer does not need that to work...

I see the same problem on your website. If I play song 1 and then hit refresh the player shows it being a different total duration nearly every time I refresh. It almost sounds like the song duration isn't be past to the flash player.

Looking at the xspf file that is being sent to your player, I am not seeing any duration tag which could cause this. Especially on slow servers where one is trying to rely on the server itself to try to determine the song duration.

The duration tag is a must of the JW Player. Their forums are plagued with issues about play durations when the duration is not defined or defined incorrectly.

I am not even seeing it in the xspf feed. Does muscol not pass that information?

germi wrote:

actually this should be the problem... many of my songs are set to 0:00 but they play entirely though..

the length that you introduce is just an extra information, JWplayer does not need that to work...

Germi,
I've had them with and without the length information and it acted the same way.

as far as server speed goes, I have one plan below virtual dedicated server which is quiet fast.

Greengeek mentioned JWplayer's forum is plagued with this issue, however though I've used the JWPlayer embed code (javascript one not the flash) with a XML playlist and I've never had any problem at all.

I need to fix this man otherwise this is useless for me. honestly I've put the time to figure out how this component works, did little customization and also spent the money to buy it and its unfortunate to face this issue

I'm not sure what's wrong but I'm sure the xspf.php does write duration info to xml feed. Look at this line:

if ($data->items[$i]->duration!="") {
$feed.= " ".htmlspecialchars($data->items[$i]->duration, ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8')."\\n";
}

That is if you have duration set.

Maybe he doesn't have them set. I am not seeing them in the playlist file:

http://chizomiz.biz/dev/component/muscol/?view=album&id=10&format=feed&type=xspf

Hi again,
what I've notices is the tracks play fine when you add them to the playlist. right length and everything.

weird , huh?

no solutions yet, I guess.
Erwin

I got around to finally adding some music on my site to test the streaming capabilities and I am running into the exact same problem I grabbed all the durations and put them in muscol so they show up correctly in the album page, but I am guessing muscol only uses that info to display text on the album page, and not actually in the playlist xspf. When I play the files via the play button so that it plays within the jw player plugin, it does not play the full song. The duration it shows in the player is shorter than the actual duration of the mp3 and so it cuts it off at that point. Typically around the last 10% or so of the song gets cut off.

You can see this issue at:

http://threechimps.com/index.php?option=com_muscol&view=album&id=3

temporary login:

username: temp
password: temp

well, you're right, the duration is not passed on the playlsit... but I think this should be a problem... anyway, let me a few time to add this info to the playlist, and see if it solves the problem.

I hope it resolves it. If it doesn't, not sure what else would cause this behavior. I will wait patiently for an update. Thanks for the help.

well I've been looking around on JW Player forums and still couldn't find nothing about this (maybe you can give it a try, too

to include the duration on the playlist XSPF file, open
/components/com_muscol/views/album/view.feed.php

and on line 43 you should actually find this commented:

$item->duration = $song->length;

just uncomment it.

but I don't think this will make a difference...

just a couple thoughts: have you tried it will all browsers? do you always get the problem?

also.. what is the BIT RATE of the problematic songs? I readed somewhere that jwplayer does not like much some "strange" bit rates...

also you can try this (still no clue if it will work.. this is a strange problem.)

on helpers/xspf.php on line 59 add this:

if(in_array(substr($data->items[$i]->location,-3), array("m4a"))) $type = "video" ;

			elseif(in_array(substr($data->items[$i]->location,-3), array("mp3"))) $type = "sound" ;

			else $type = "" ;

			

			if($type) $feed.= "".$type."";

Thank you for the update. I will give it a try and report what I find.

The bug exists on the jw player after 4.3. They are aware of the bug. Unfortunately it affects mp3 playback more so than video, and they have been quick to point out that the jw player is designed to be a video player. Using it as an audio player is just a side feature. They have been far slower at fixing anything that is related to using it as an audio player, so who knows how long it will take. Basically it is a problem with the player not being able to correctly determine the songs length. This can be caused by a lot of things such as bad headers or mp3s sampled at anything other than 44.1kHz, such as 48kHz. The solutions they give were to include the song length in the xspf playlist, either hard coding the song length or using something to read the file to automatically get it like the getid3 library. This fixed the issue the majority of the time. The other option was to downgrade to the 4.3 player. Downgrading to the 4.3 player doesn't always fix the issue as well as one then loses quite a bit of features that were added since, like some bug fixes, additional api calls and some skin and mod support.

If you do a search for "duration" on their forums you will see all the problems people have been having with it. Here is one of the topics http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/forum/setup-problems/19143/mp3-duration-problem You may have to go back a few pages in the search results as this bug has been there for more than a year now.

Also something I found interesting while reading up on this subject. In the 4.x player, if the length is included in the xspf file it will use the length. If the field is empty, then it will not set it to 0:00 but try to attempt to get the duration itself. Looks like it might be backwards compatible with allowing for both defined duration fields as well as undefined duration fields for those that don't want to enter a song duration. http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/forum/bug-reports/22841/v5-player-handles-durations-differently-than-v4


Yes it happens on all browsers. The durations are random though. Sometimes it guesses the right duration other times it will be off and the amount it can be off can change. Most songs are 44.1kHz. They are all ripped or tagged with jaikoz, picard, media monkey, or the godfather. Also this issue does not happen in other streaming programs I have used on the same files. Those other programs include the duration in the xspf though which is one of the few things different that could affect this.

EDITED to add additional notes and details.

Works great! I only tried the first suggestion which was to uncomment the duration line but that fixed the problem. Also the songs now load a lot quicker as well which is an added bonus. Thanks for the help!

really?????

well, well. that is AWESOME news. I never though it would be that easy!

greengeek wrote:

Works great! I only tried the first suggestion which was to uncomment the duration line but that fixed the problem. Also the songs now load a lot quicker as well which is an added bonus. Thanks for the help!

Hey after uncommenting that line , did you still put in the length? or did you leave it empty?

cheers

I still put in the length in mc. I am using windows so I just set my folder view that my songs are in to show Duration. That way I could quickly get the durations of the songs and add them into the album song pages in mc.

Has this been resolved?

I have the same problem... I tried the two solutions Germi suggested with no luck. I am using the latest build of the MC component and JW plugin.

EDIT...
This has actually been resolved when using the latest JW Player from longtail video. I tried replacing player.swf and swfobject.js with the latest version and it works fine. However, using the updated player does not completely work with the current playlist plug-ins and modules. Any chance we can get the plugins updated for the newer version of the JW player?

the new jplayer will come soon, however first we want to publish the update to improve frontend addition...

but will come!!!

germi wrote:

well I've been looking around on JW Player forums and still couldn't find nothing about this (maybe you can give it a try, too

to include the duration on the playlist XSPF file, open
/components/com_muscol/views/album/view.feed.php

and on line 43 you should actually find this commented:

$item->duration = $song->length;

just uncomment it.

but I don't think this will make a difference...

just a couple thoughts: have you tried it will all browsers? do you always get the problem?

also.. what is the BIT RATE of the problematic songs? I readed somewhere that jwplayer does not like much some "strange" bit rates...

Hi germi

For some of us who's not familiar with the"uncomment"
What would be the code to replace the line"$item->duration = $song->length;"

I am having the same issue. My musics keep cutting short at the end.

Thanks

hello!

are you using version 2.1? I think we fixed this issue on 2.1...!!

Hi germi,

I am using 2.1 and it only works fine in ie. other browsers cut the musics short.