I recently added a link within one of my posts to a .wma audio file containing a song I wanted my blog visitors to hear. When I attempted to listen to the file, it showed up as a plain text (gibberish) display in my Firefox 0.8 (for Windows) window. When I tried to listen to the follow in IE it played perfectly.
After posting in the Typepad UserGroup, a member told me that the file played perfectly for him in IE, Camino, Safari and Firefox for Mac.
When I asked a Mozilla discussion group member what was wrong he told me that the Typepad sever designates Windows Media Player audio files as plain text.
Type: text/plain
The server is telling the browser to display it as plaintext. On mine, it simply took forever to load, and showed gibberish in the window due to the incorrect MIME type.
Incorrect MIME types currently work in IE, but this will be fixed in WinXP SP2. When that happens, IE will just display it as plaintext also. Get your server configured properly before then…
Other Mozilla members have confirmed that the TP server is the one which is assigning file types to my audio file and that this is where the problem lies.
Brenna later confirmed the problem and said the server engineers were now aware of the problem and would be fixing in “one of the next updates.” I hope they address this soon, because as soon as XP moves to the SP2 format many more TP users who upload .wma files will be shut out as I am currently.
