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Entry  28 Nov 2019, Konstantin Olchanski, Bug Report, midas alarm sound unreliable in google-chrome 
    Reply  28 Nov 2019, Stefan Ritt, Bug Report, midas alarm sound unreliable in google-chrome beep.mp3
Message ID: 1742     Entry time: 28 Nov 2019     Reply to this: 1743
Author: Konstantin Olchanski 
Topic: Bug Report 
Subject: midas alarm sound unreliable in google-chrome 
I accidentally discovered a problem with the alarm sounds played by midas.

The javascript code is very simple: var audio=new Audio("alarm.mp3"); audio.play();

In the past, this reliably played a sound.

More recently, I started seeing javascript log messages about "unhandled exception" from audio.play(). (for me, they often
interrupt my javascript debugger sessions, in a very annoying way).

Adding an exception handler to audio.play() was not effective: it turns out, these days, audio.play() returns a Promise
and one must handle the Promise rejection case. (also it turns out that in the rejection handler
one *must* clear audio.src to avoid problems with excessive memory and cpu use).

But why does audio.play() throw a rejected promise?!?

This is the error message provided: "play() failed because the user didn't interact with the document first. https://goo.gl/xX8pDD"
name: "NotAllowedError".

The link takes us to https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes. This web page seems to explain
everything neatly, but most of the information turns out to be wrong and unhelpful:

a) "Muted autoplay is always allowed" - wrong - I see audio.play() rejection from muted tabs
b) "User has interacted with the domain (click, tap, etc.)." - wrong - I see rejection in the javascript debugger even as I debug the web page
c) "user's Media Engagement Index threshold has been crossed" - broken - playback count and MEI is always 0 (zero) for midas - per chrome://media-engagement/
d) "user has added the site to their home screen on mobile or installed the PWA on desktop" - what ?!?
e) chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy does not exist (was removed)

There may be a way to start google-chrome with special flags to globally enable autoplay, but it seems
to be aimed at "kiosk" type applications, not for general use browsers:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57455849/chrome-autoplay-policy-chrome-76

The bottom line:

there is no way to ensure that the alarm sound will always play

K.O.

P.S. I am tracking this problem here:
https://bitbucket.org/tmidas/midas/issues/191/exception-on-audioplay
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