Info on systems that run audio_play successfully?
For those who use the hydro audio_play and don't have issues with it, would you mind sharing your system information? OS type and version would certainly be relevant, as well as GStreamer version.
(As I document here, I've had issues with Ubuntu 12.04 and GStreamer 0.10.36 that appear related to buffer underflow.)
For continuity, here are questions others have asked about what may be the same problem. http://answers.ros.org/question/132506/audio_play-stops-producing-sound/http://answers.ros.org/question/12777/audio_play-on-turtlebot-messages-being-sent-but-no-audio-output/