Can Music play in background tabs?

July 6, 2006 2:02 PM

Quick question - when I'm playing something in me-fi music and switch windows, I lose the sound. This seems unusual - normally I can hear background sound in any open Firefox window. What am I doing wrong?
posted by jonathanbell to MetaFilter Music at 2:02 PM (7 comments total)

please to be reading this
posted by Rhomboid at 2:26 PM on July 6, 2006

OK, it works fine if I stream the audio from the comments page and not the main page. Thanks for pointing me towards that thread.
posted by jonathanbell at 2:52 PM on July 6, 2006

Bingo! I had the same problem so thanks guys.
posted by ceri richard at 3:40 PM on July 6, 2006

I'm having this problem also, annoyingly only after upgrading to Opera 9 from 8.5, and it doesn't even work using the comments page. Though it seems to work fine for me in FF 1.5. Annoyance.

The only solution I saw after reading that whole damn thread is to keep another browser window open just off to the side, with at least 1 pixel of the flash player visible, or if you don't want to do that, use a different browser or different browser version.
posted by MetaMonkey at 4:21 PM on July 6, 2006

please to be reading this

There are 337 comments in that thread.
posted by smackfu at 4:25 PM on July 6, 2006

There are 337 comments in that thread.

Yeah.

There must be some technical reason why you can stream it from a backgrounded comments window but not the backgrounded main page. I'd love to see it overcome. I like to start something streaming from the front page, then open links/bookmarks/whatever in new tabs and keep browsing while I listen. When the song ends or I decide I want to hear something else, it's nice to have the front page still open.
posted by scarabic at 5:49 PM on July 6, 2006

I think it has to do with flash 8, i don't think older versions of flash did such things.
posted by sourbrew at 1:01 AM on July 7, 2006