Audio distortions online

URL of experiment:

Description of the problem:

I’m running an experiment looking at temporal estimation in accelerating and decelerating tones. I have everything working except that on my computer in both firefox and chrome (Macbook), sometimes the sound gets randomly distorted (I can only describe it as… buzzy?) at some time point during the files. In addition, some tones can randomly be delayed from their position in the wave file. That’s an important issue for a study on temporal estimation!

I always knew that the start of a sound could be delayed but in this case, each wav file corresponds to one trial (8 tones). So it seems the delay is occuring in the middle of playback.

Question 1. Do other people on other computers also hear this distortion in my experiment? I get it about once every two or three trials.

Question 2: How to fix this? I haven’t seen this problem described in other issues. I’m using 16-bit wav files which both firefox and chrome claim to be compatible with. Should I bite the bullet and switch to mp3?

Thanks in advance for your input!
Keith

Switching to mp3 files seems to have fixed the problem. In fact, I first only moved the training trials to mp3 files just to make sure I had done it right but this seemed to fix the problem even for the wav files in the main experiment. I’m still switching everything to mp3 for uniformity but if some one REALLY wants .wav and comes up against this again, you could maybe get away with doing one .mp3 file at the beginning and putting the rest in wav.