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[Josh Anderson]

Web Audio Plus is a popular resale rights "put audio on website" piece of junk.

It is the internet's worst solution for putting audio on a website.

There are many reason's that it sucks but the reason I am posting this is to let anyone know who has used Web Audio Plus in the past that you are now going to need to take down your web audio plus audio presentations and redo them with a different solution.

Why you ask?

It is because for some reason Flashplayer 9 does not agree with some SWF producing softwares audio and makes them sound like chipmunks.

Flashplayer 9 was released by adobe in December and now has an estimated 90% + penetration 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.

[Virginia Culp]

Josh,

What are some of those solutions that you have in mind?

Ginny

[Joseph Ratliff]

Thanks for the heads up Josh!  I honestly didn't know that...switching now.

Man, I am behind the times when it comes to this technical stuff some times.

[Josh Anderson]

Josh,

What are some of those solutions that you have in mind?

Ginny

Well of course I would recommend my own www.websitejukebox.com - www.totalwebaudio.com as one of the best solutions.

But frankly anything is better than web audio plus... even most free players.

The key is to NOT use a audio software that converts the mp3 file to an swf button.

Instead use a player that simply calls an external mp3 file and does not mess with your mp3.

Another important thing to watch for when choosing an audio player:

Does it force the entire audio file to load before it plays?

This is one of the reason's that Web Audio Plus gets the title of "worst audio solution on the internet."

It forces the entire audio file to download before it plays and not only that the play buttons are not visible until the audio file downloads. In some cases I have even seen "gurus" using this cheap piece of junk with long audio messages on direct response web pages!

Yikes.

If a message is of significant length it can take many tens of seconds or even minutes depending on the visitors internet connection for web audio plus buttons to appear as well as for the audio to play. In a world with no attention span this is simply not an option.

So look for a solution that loads fast and does not wait for the entire audio file to download before it plays.... for example my players play in 10 seconds or less over any internet connection.

When it comes to multimedia so many direct response marketers do not realize how important fast loading times are... they may split test copy, headlines and all sorts of stuff yet so many fail to optimize both their audio and their video and do not even stop and think about how they can improve their results by making sure their media loads fast and streams quickly.