Audio corruption
quintin3265 · January 29, 2013 at 14:59 UTC
Last month, someone pointed out that a few songs had been corrupted with clicks. Being busy fixing other problems, I didn't get around to investigating this one until now. It turns out that there is a serious issue with file corruption in MP3 files caused by Lunarpages using an obsolete version of ffmpeg, the audio encoder used by the site. The newest version of ffmpeg, which I'm using on the development server, resolves the issue. They refuse to update ffmpeg on their shared servers and tried to sell me a service costing $50.00/month that would allow me to upgrade.
This convinced me that it was finally time to follow another suggestion that I knew would have to be done eventually, which was to buy a virtual private server from another company - so I did so. However, this unmanaged server comes barebones, with nothing installed. It's going to take the weekend to install everything the site needs and switch over to it. Until then, there may be some audio issues. A side benefit of this new server is that it has much greater bandwidth than does the other server, and has dedicated resources, so it won't slow down in the evenings. We also won't have to deal with their technical issues like the cron daemon going down and the server randomly restarting.
The audio issues only occur in MP3 files, and only in downloaded MP3 files. Listening to MP3 files on the site appears to work normally, although the displayed length of the file may be off by a few seconds. Once the new server is configured, this issue will be resolved.
This convinced me that it was finally time to follow another suggestion that I knew would have to be done eventually, which was to buy a virtual private server from another company - so I did so. However, this unmanaged server comes barebones, with nothing installed. It's going to take the weekend to install everything the site needs and switch over to it. Until then, there may be some audio issues. A side benefit of this new server is that it has much greater bandwidth than does the other server, and has dedicated resources, so it won't slow down in the evenings. We also won't have to deal with their technical issues like the cron daemon going down and the server randomly restarting.
The audio issues only occur in MP3 files, and only in downloaded MP3 files. Listening to MP3 files on the site appears to work normally, although the displayed length of the file may be off by a few seconds. Once the new server is configured, this issue will be resolved.