Desktop Safari HTML 5 Audio Bug -- Intermittent Load Fail

On Snow Leopard, certain MP3 files have problems loading. Reloading this page perhaps 5+ times may produce different results with the same files. "stalled" is often the last-reported event in a failure case.

If you click on the MP3 file links, you'll notice that the files often fail to play in their own window.

(Sometimes, clicking to seek within a track will get it going.)

All sounds work perfectly in Leopard 10.5 with Safari and QuickTime 7.

Snow Leopard 10.6.3 through 10.6.7 (last update: March 31, 2011) appear to be affected.

June 23rd, 2011 update: OS X 10.6.8 appears to have fixed this issue. Pre-release OS X 10.7 ("Lion") betas have also been reported to have fixed things.

Quoting a reply to the bug, "the problem is below WebKit ("... also fail to play when opened in QT Player X"), so a new release of Safari is unlikely to fix this." (boourns. :/)

Bonus irony: Safari on Windows works fine, and does not have this issue. :D

Related Apple/webkit bug: bugs.webkit.org #32159