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Can we fix the dialogue replay so they do not stop/stutter at the fourth character on first play?

I am running chinese pod on chrome/windows 10 with a good internet connection and find no pauses when running video or main dialogs, but do find that dialogue/expansion and dictation replays have an irritating pause at approximately the fourth-fifth character.

Is there something different about you how you load or deliver the dialogue replays there. It seems pretty common to me across all lessons.

I find that the first playback of each dialogue has a strong pause or stutter - usually three to five characters into the phrase, then it recovers to deliver the rest. It is more noticeable on the longer phrases.

It only happens for the first time, you play each dialog on the dialogue or expansion pages. If you playback the same sentence again, there is no pause, so I assume it is something related to how you download the audio for the first playback, but I do not get similar pauses in the lessons. Perhaps you could pre-download all the audio on the dialogue page when the user opens that tab so the pause is not seen, but perhaps there is a simpler reason because similar pauses do not happen on main lessons.

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Just to be clear - The stuttering is only occuring on the single sentence replays shown within the tabs called dictation, expansion or testing - they do not occur on replay of the entire dialogue.

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I have the same problem.

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I also have this problem, except it happens usually in the 1st/2nd character

I’ve added this problem to the development board to get looked at.

It’s due to the audio playing before the entire sentence has downloaded. It tends to be worse on slower connections. If we do fix it, the trade off would likely be a tiny pause in audio playback, while the audio buffers.

@jitendra

Hi Gwilym, thanks for looking into this for us. I would say my connection is pretty good but maybe theres other latency issues (on my end).

The other query i have about audio playback, is that i’m currently chewing through a bunch of newbie lessons to try and catch up to where I think I’m at (have studied some mandarin before CP) and when using the 1.5x playback speed on the full lesson audio, it sounds like whatever method is being used to speed up the audio is also auto-tuning it, which messes with the tones - it’s the same auto-tune effect as in pop music, so the tone doesn’t slide up or down, but instead rapidly steps from one tone to the next

Obviously if i’m listening to a lesson at 1.5x I already feel pretty confident with the material, and i’m definitely not saying you need to fix it. But i guess I just want to make you aware of this autotune effect in case you feel like it needs attention.

Justin

Thanks for passing it to development. It really depends on the size of the pause you get by buffering complete sentences, as one of the nice feels of your app/webpage is no delay for starting audio.

If the pause is going to get large, then perhaps place a button at the top of the tab that preloads all sentence audios on that page so it then feels instantaneous to use.

Hi Gwilym, just an update to my previous post regarding the ‘auto tune’ effect on the 1.5x playback. It would seem that it’s my browser doing this (firefox) as I have tried it in safari and chrome and the effect was not evident. So there you go. Firefox is dumb :smiley:

Thanks for the reply. Yeah I personally hadn’t noticed that effect. Seems Firefox likes Kanye and T-Pain.

This stutter issue is now fixed for me, I think is was fixed by Chinese pod Server relocation to US in Jul/Aug 2017.

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That’s good to hear. Yeah it makes sense. The mp3 audio was already coming from the US server, but had to go via a server in Asia first. Now it all comes directly from NYC.