When previewing audio files on Dropbox, the playback skips or drops out. Any ideas?

[Tinlinmusic]

Hello, just wondered if any other music tech-y people have had any trouble with glitchy audio files when using Dropbox to share them?
A track that I have mixed and bounced down on my studio pc, which plays fine with no problems, once shared On DB if you listen to the track on a different device it is full of digital glitches and audio dropouts.
Any ideas?

[Rich]

When playing a file on the Dropbox website, you're not playing the original. You're getting a transcoded preview of the original file. To hear the file in its original file as intended, it needs to be downloaded to your computer and opened in a supported application.

[Tinlinmusic]

Thanks for the reply. I guess that makes sense. Could the glitches on the audio file be caused by a flaky internet signal?

[kroft]

This seems to be new. It's not the poor quality transcoding that has been discussed before, but short dropouts. I've been using Dropbox to share audio files with clients for some time, and this has just started happening.

[Tinlinmusic]

Well I'm glad it's not just me having problems with this (but obviously sorry that you are too!). I have tried re-exporting the same track several times, but when I copy it to Dropbox the glitches keep occurring, and not in the same place each time. 

[kroft]

Yes, that's my experience too. It's a very new behaviour so far as I can tell. I'll try raising a support ticket.

[SECRETSOUND]

Same.  Glad I found this thread.  I'm a full time studio owner and just finished a record with a band.  Uploaded all the final mixes for review and heard back that there were skips and glitches at very precise timestamps.  When I previewed them on DropBox on the same computer I used to mix, they were glitching in the exact same spots for me.
So I deleted their entire folder and reuploaded everything.  Heard back that there were new, different glitches in different spots.  I thought maybe it was my browser or internet connection.  Glad to be able to tell them there's a workaround, thx.

[Tinlinmusic]

So it would appear to be a Dropbox fault, which is good news for my studio pc which was about to get launched out of the window!

I have tried making the file 'available offline' on my iphone and it seems to be stable, so far. Obviously, you can't always expect clients that I'm sharing these files with to do the same, and why should they? It's such a pity, as in the past Dropbox has always been a very reliable way of sending/sharing audio files, in my experience. 

[kroft]

Yes, that will cache the original file rather than the Dropbox "preview". I agree Dropbox was great for this purpose until this started happening. Now I've had people thinking it was really bad editing on my part! I've raised a support ticket and pointed them to this thread, and also given them access to some examples where it's happening. It's surely a change made on their side, so hopefully they can fix it.

[Tinlinmusic]

Good luck with the support ticket. Let us know how you get on!