Do you use Web Audio Plus? You had better check... chipmumks!

[Josh Anderson]

Web Audio Plus is a popular resale rights software for putting audio on a website... and since the release by Adobe in december of Flashplayer 9 (which now has an estimated 98% market penetration) Web Audio Plus audio presentations are getting the "chipmunks."

If you use it you had better check your audio presentations on browsers with Flashplayer 9 installed on your computer (most by now).

I have always considered it to be the internet's worst solution for putting audio on a website but it just got worse.

For some reason Flashplayer 9 does not agree with some SWF producing softwares audio and makes them sound like chipmunks. (this is the same problem Camtasia produced SWF Videos are having).

Flashplayer 9 was released by adobe in December replacing flashplayer 8.

For those of you who are not aware flashplayer is what makes it so you can view things like youtube video and audio buttons etc around the web. It automatically updates when the user is prompted so anyone who views or listens to any type of flash content on the web on a regular basis has been prompted to update.

Anyone visiting a site with a web audio plus button on it who has flashplayer 9 installed will not hear your audio normally... it will sound like two chipmunks fighting occasionally through the play of your audio.

This issue did not only effect web audio plus... another software that I am not a fan of, Camtasia Studio, has the same problem with any video that was rendered as an swf. In that case the easy fix is to render as flv instead.

But with web audio plus there is no fix to the chipmunks. The only solution is to throw that piece of junk in the trash and start over with something that does not convert your audio into an swf file but rather plays it natively as an mp3 file without converting it to another format.

Most professional audio player solutions provide players that play your mp3 file externally.

[Sean A McAlister]

Thanks for that info!

I was just looking into that.

I will not use it now.

Sean

[ecoverartist]

Hi Josh,

I thought Web Audio Plus was your software? Or is it a different one?

[Robert Plank]

Originally Posted by Josh Anderson

But with web audio plus there is no fix to the chipmunks. The only solution is to throw that piece of junk in the trash and start over with something that does not convert your audio into an swf file but rather plays it natively as an mp3 file without converting it to another format

Not true.

There are tools that will re-encode the MP3 stream within the SWF to the proper bitrate (removes chipmunks).

Remove Chipmunks from Camtasia Videos

[Josh Anderson]

"Not true.

There are tools that will re-encode the MP3 stream within the SWF to the proper bitrate (removes chipmunks).

Remove Chipmunks from Camtasia Videos

Cool... then in that case anyone using web audio plus will want at the minimum to do that.

(that also brings up another great point... thousands and thousands of old camtasia videos still online have this problem because publishers either do not know about it yet or have not taken the time to correct it.)

I highly recommend not using Web Audio Plus it to begin with though because it has two other major issues:

1. It forces the entire audio file to download before it plays. Really bad for direct response and for visitors on slower connections.

2. The audio buttons do not appear until the audio file is fully downloaded.

Essentially in the "no attention span" world we currently do business in online any solution that does not progressively download and play or stream (web audio pus does not) is a bad choice for online publishers.

Any other audio solution I have ever come accross both free and paid are a better choice than Web Audio Plus... yet there are so many resellers of this software and so many users who do not know better that it still is widely used on websites.

Hi Josh,

I thought Web Audio Plus was your software? Or is it a different one?

No way. I don't create junk ;-)

[Suthan M]

Cool, now i FINALLY know that all thsi while it is not just me who was hearing chipmunk sounds on Camtasia video that i check.

And to think that all this while i busted some speakers on my laptop.. man, ignorance kills..
ow