Hugo’s blog

People (and that includes myself) often write to complain about stuff, and rarely praise people who do well.

I feel like I need to do the latter here. I have been frustrated by Flash not playing certain MP3s right. Investigating the problem, I found that MP3s with a bit rate of 48kHz were the ones causing problems, and looked into documentation on the Web, only to find out the following:

It may interest you to know that I was using MP3s that were encoded in iTunes at a 48kHz sample rate. Flash MX resamples all audio down to bit rates in increments of 11 (11, 22, 44, etc.). That resampling caused the percieved slow-down in pitch.

Here, I had the source of my problem. I only have a low number of MP3s encoded as such, so I thought about reencoding them. But I thought that I should report the bug to Adobe, just in case it may lead to a fix. So I found a Web form to do so. Coming to think of it, I actually didn’t use the right form, I should have used this one instead.

Anyway, I tersely described my problem, not having too high hopes as I usually feel like feedback forms are black holes. Exactly 8 minutes and 11 seconds later, I received an email from an Adobe engineer sent from his Treo, pointing me to the latest beta of Flash and instructing me to test the latest beta version and write back if it didn’t fix my problem. Impressive.

So I’m happy to report that version 9.0.60 is perfectly playing my 48kHz MP3s as I write this.