Update: Grooveshark Streaming Issues

Ben Westermann-Clark

April 22, 2008

As we mentioned earlier [ http://www.grooveshark.com/blog/2008/04/18/grooveshark-lite-getting-better/ ], we’ve been working round-the-clock to get Grooveshark as useful and stable as possible since last week’s launch (and round of updates [ http://www.grooveshark.com/blog/2008/04/08/big-updates-have-arrived/ ] even before that). Right now, there are is still some song-streaming funkiness occurring sporadically which can be caused by a couple of different things.

One of the major problems we’ve become privy to relates to a recent known bug involving the current release of Firefox [ http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=en-US&forumId=1&comments_parentId=7929 ] for Windows users. Although they don’t know what the exact cause is right now, Mozilla support offers a couple of suggestions for working around it:

1) You can uninstall both the ActiveX plug-in for Windows as well as the Flash plug-in for Firefox by following Adobe’s instructions here [ http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14157&sliceId=2 ]. Since there are two different Flash installers for Windows (Firefox and Internet Explorer, respectively), you might want to download the Flash uninstaller [ http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/uninstall_flash_player.exe ] for Firefox, close Firefox and run the uninstaller, then download and run the latest installer [ http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/current/install_flash_player.exe ] just to be sure.

2) If that doesn’t work, some people have reported [ http://weyland.be/wrdprss/index.php/2006/08/22/no-sound-in-macromedia-flash-player-9/ ] success uninstalling Flash, running CCleaner [ http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/ ], rebooting, then re-installing Flash. This will take care of some users’ problems who’ve been missing wavemapper in their Windows registry.

3) Try closing all tabs, clearing your cache, restarting Firefox, then loading a song from Grooveshark again. This is definitely not a long-term fix, but it works for a while–and it’s quick and easy.

Much of Grooveshark is based on open source project Red5. As a media streaming server, it does everything we need to power the basic functionality of Grooveshark –but it still needs a bit of work. We’ve been tirelessly poring through the code, working on optimization that should hopefully not only mitigate the aforementioned Windows+Firefox bug, but lessen the need for restarting servers–making everything reliable, rock-solid, and as stable as a noble gas [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_gas ].

All of us at Grooveshark can’t thank you guys enough for being patient with us. We’re a small bunch, and all of your interest is really amazing. And thanks to those of you who’ve sent us feedback [ feedback@grooveshark.com ]; we’re always on the lookout to hear what you guys want, so thanks to those who’ve voiced their opinion–keep it up, everyone, and we’ll keep not sleeping to make Grooveshark better!