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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I get it. On desktop I just click to play the next beat? On mobile there's no audio (in Safari or Chrome). And the track selection appears to be broken?

Have I missed something? What's the pull here?

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I had to switch off silent mode on iPhone for audio to work. Any chance it’s the same issue for you?

Bingo! Thank you. Turning off silent mode and refreshing the page fixed it.

That's very strange though, I wonder if it uses a weird sort of web calling API or something for the audio. I've never had an issue with audio in web pages before, and even the youtube video the page embeds sounds fine. It seems quite poor UX (of Safari? Chrome?) to require turning off silent mode – many people never turn it off so it's not very discoverable, and then forgetting to turn it back on again could be pretty bad.

You are not alone! It’s indeed very bad UX on the part of Apple.

I run a website with music education tools and we had to make a dedicated help page for this particular annoyance:

https://www.soundslice.com/help/en/player/troubleshooting/23...

You're confused why a feature called "silent mode" would make your phone not make sound?

iOS has changed over time, such that silent mode affects notification and interaction sounds but not multimedia - I can still listen to music or watch videos regardless of whether the phone is on silent or not.

"Silent mode" is not the same as "mute". With the former you still expect to hear sound if you're using a function where sound is critical.

There is no other media content that is disabled by silent mode. My mental model for silent mode is that it silences things outside my control - like calls - but not things that I explicitly ask for, like music.

It doesn’t make sounds on my mobile Chrome either (iOS) but I’ve noticed other sites don’t either. I’m guessing there’s a setting somewhere that I denied once long ago and now it can’t play sounds :/ If anyone knows what that might be please let me know!

Honestly, I don't understand what the pull is either. This is just cow clicker for music. I appreciate the design and interactivity, which is nice, but maybe because I'm a musician, I don't understand what is fun about this.

Try speeding it up and slowing it down: it's not guitar hero.

Took me a few seconds.

Also, on mobile you can mega-tap.

Is your phone on silent?

Hahah yes, yes it was.

I had audio in Safari. But it didn't start right away.

How long does it take to start? I've given it a few minutes and still nothing. I'm on fast stable wifi and the audio worked immediately on a desktop on the same wifi so I can't imagine it's having trouble downloading the samples.

Safari iOS - started in after perhaps 8 taps

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