Can't Listen to Car Talk on Line

General Discussion
1

Since May 28th I have not been able to listen to Car Talk on my two Windows 7 PC’s.
It doesn’t play on IE9, Google Chrome, or Firefox.
Is there a fix?

2

Hi, there have been a few player issues lately. I’ll pass on your comment to the folks who handle the show streaming. Sorry for the difficulty.

3

I forgot to mention than I am using Windows 7 64 bit.

4

When this happens I just download the latest WMP from Microsoft. It always works. I also have Windows 7 64 bit.

5

missileman - Car Talk Player pops up when I click on a show segment, not WMP.

I have the latest WMP.

Both of my Windows 7 PC’s stopped working with Car Talk at the same time and they both have the latest updates.

But if you have no problems listening, there must be something I could do to fix this.

6

Hi, Philip. I just heard that Car Talk is about to start investigating a change of the player we use for the weekly show. It’s going to be a little tricky, because it has to coordinate with the type of player NPR uses, too. We’re hoping to come up with a solution that works for everyone. We know that some folks with certain versions of browsers have issues. I know it’s not a complete answer to the question, but I will let you know when I hear something useful. Thanks for your patience.

7

Gosh, I didn’t even know I could hear the shows online.

  1. Works perfect in Linux Kubuntu 10.04 on my old bottom of line Dell Vostro.
  2. I can listen here in Mexico. There are some channels which refuse to let us listen out of country. Thanks a million.
8

Cool! Glad you’re able to listen. Most likely, you’ll still be able to listen once the new player is implemented, whenever that is.

9

I posted a few weeks ago about how I can’t listen online and it still continues.

I can download the podcast but I’m talking about clicking the “listen now” button. Used to work just fine with my IE8 but now it doesn’t. I get the player popup but that’s it. Very frustrating. If I use Google Chrome it works so obviously it 's related to IE8 but I’ve done everything to troubleshoot but no joy.

10

Hi - yes, I remember your post. This is what Doug Mayer, the Senior Web Lackey at Car Talk, said in his post from the other day:

“Folks, We are seeing some users, on certain combinations of browsers, having issues with the streaming player we use which is a version of the very commonly-used JW player. We’ve actually started a process that will take us towards a new player, but any change probably won’t launch for a few months, yet. We’ll also be revisiting related issues of where we host the audio, serving underwriting and other issues as part of this process. In the mean time, if you’re still having issues, you can always grab the free podcast. Thanks for bearing with us. We hope to launch with a new system before long, that’ll make for a better user experience and fewer issues.”

I’m sorry it’s a hassle, but until the player issues are fixed, you might want to stick with using Chrome for that.

11

I didn’t care for the podcast because I was unable to stop, start and replay.
I would have to restart it each time I tried.

Plus, Itunes takes a lot of liberties with your computer resources.

Finally, I found this MP3 file on NPR -
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=9911203