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Forum Discussion
Bug Report: the Dropbox MP3 player plays two parts of audio at once.
I'm encountering what appears to be a Dropbox web client bug. While playing an mp3, when move the playhead (i.e,. choose somewhere other than the beginning of the audio), I hear two parts of the song playing simultaneously.
Steps to reproduce:
- Log into dropbox.com (NOTE: I'm using Mac OS 14.4.1 (23E224), and am accessing Dropbox via Chrome browser.)
- Open an mp3 file (e.g., https://www.dropbox.com/home/music/example.mp3)
- Invoke "Play" by pressing the space bar
- Observe that it plays normally
- Invoke "Pause" by pressing the space bar
- Click somewhere in the middle of the song
- Invoke "Play" by pressing the space bar
- BUG: Observe that you hear two parts of the song playing simultaneously; as if there are two music players, one playing the beginning of the song, and one playing what you chose for "somewhere in the middle of the song" (ostensibly, there are two audio buffers that play simultaneously. )
- Invoke "Pause" by clicking on the "Pause" button with the mouse
- BUG: Observe that one buffer stopped playing, but the other continues (despite the "Pause" button now changing to a "Play" button, which should imply it is paused).
Some thoughts:
- This is essentially 100% reproducible for me, and happens with every mp3 every time. It seems like a Dropbox bug because (1) it does not not occur, for example, on other music websites, and (2) it seems to matter whether I press the space bar versus click with the mouse to play/pause.
- Clicking the back button and going back into the song does not appear to be enough to workaround this. I'm only able to work around it by going to a different song, which seems to get the buffers reset until I mess with the playhead again.
- I've only tried mp3 files, so I've been saying "mp3", but I have no reason to believe the issue is specific to mp3 files.
Completely unrelatedly, I encountered a bug while trying to create this very issue.
When I tried to create this issue, Dropbox gave me an error:
Content Not Published
Your post contains invalid HTML. Remove the following invalid tags before publishing: a, em (data-darkreader-inline-bgcolor), em (data-darkreader-inline-color), span (data-darkreader-inline-bgcolor), span (data-darkreader-inline-color)
Ah, so, I use a Chrome extension named "Dark Reader" (which automatically changes the background colors of websites to be darker), and clearly it interfered with this textbox. Yikes, I guess I will place the blame on the Chrome extension for this one.
Then, when trying to post this reply (as in, the one I'm writing now), I got this error:
Content Not Published
Your post contains invalid HTML. Remove the following invalid tags before publishing: h1, span (data-testid)
Frankly I have no idea what this means and don't know how to fix it. But this is starting to get annoying.
Some feedback on this: your website made it hard to fix these errors, because even after I disabled the plugin, your website persisted what I had written before, including the bad HTML, so I got stuck in a "bad state" and had to rewrite the issue from scratch. If your website provided a way to view the raw HTML (or markdown) of the textview, then I could have probably resolved it without having to rewrite everything.
Also, I'm realizing now that we can't edit typos out of our posts? Wow, I've been a long-term fan of Dropbox, but this UX disaster I've just experienced here left a really bad taste in my mouth.
- Nancy
Dropbox Staff
Hi Jay385736! Thanks for posting on our forum.
Regarding the main issue you’re experiencing with your .mp3 files, I also tested this on my end with a couple of similar audio files, but I didn’t encounter the same issue.
Can you please test this on a different browser and/or an incognito window and let me know if the behavior persists?
As for your feedback on the HTML of the website, it’s much appreciated and I’ve passed it on to the appropriate team.
Finally, you should be able to edit your posts on the forum by clicking on the ellipsis button next to your post and selecting “Edit” from the drop-down menu:
If you want to edit your original/first post, you’ll need to click on the gear icon that’s located in the upper right corner of the page and select the “Edit” option from there instead.
Keep me in the loop for any updates.
