Sneaky, Tricky, Crafty…Apple Safari 5 Refuses To Play Purchased Media

Author: erics, Posted September 16th, 2010 at 3:47:36pm

I tried to use mp3 files on a client web site that I obtained from both Amazon, and from a file I generated from iTunes.

Today the client stated that the music no longer played.

To make a long, painful story short, IMHO Safari 5 now reads the file ID3 headers to determine the copy protection state of the file. If Safari thinks that the file is not “legitimate”, it refuses to play it. Same website, same file plays fine in all the other browsers. So I pulled a little tool called LAME out of my bag of tricks and re-encoded the mp3 file back into an mp3 file. I uploaded it and it instantly started working.

Here is the command and some helpful acquisition info:

[code]user% lame -h broken.mp3 working.mp3[/code]

You can get LAME from SourceForge for free here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/lame/files/lame/

I was able to use VersionTracker Pro to install it without compiling.

Categories: How-To's, Technology Tags: apple, audio, encoding, howto, ID3, LAME, mp3, tips