For comparison here is the player in firefox trunk. It also has a short slider to move to different times, however it's easier to use. Not easy just relatively easier. I think in both cases the slider could be longer.

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This should be taken care of by the new media controls and I was going to close this but I see that on my Chrome instance, <audio controls> doesn't seem to even work.

The new media controls do make this a bit better (about on par with Firefox), but it's still pretty unusable with an hour-long audio track and the controls as short as they are on that site. In the end, there's always going to be a length of track and width of controls that make it difficult though. This site should almost certainly set a greater width on the audio tag

How about the minimum width for local media playing then? When playing an audio only file the local player and slider, especially the volume slider is always insanely narrow. Does this get addressed by the new media controls already?

I'm not convinced it's the site's width of tag. If you go directly to the URL http://media2.risky.biz/RB484.mp3 you'll see the player in Chrome is about the same size. The player in Firefox Trunk is much wider though than it is as part of their webpage, so it has something to do with it I guess.

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Yea, that's the minimum width I was talking about. Or should I call it default width; it should be as wide as reasonable (both progress and volume) unless the tag explicitly specifies it to be short.
It's not likely that would cause too much layout problem, if any the site owner should be in blame for not specifying an appropriate width.

Closing this as the new media controls have a longer scrubber.

My media controls the slider looks the same.

Windows 7 and Chrome Version 65.0.3325.181 (Official Build) (64-bit)

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When things are marked fixed here (this bug tracker), it means they are fixed on the latest builds, which are on average near three months away from becoming the Stable releases you are using.

If you want to experience the fix now, you can choose from either:
1) Switch to Dev releases channel, which are derived from latest builds once a week (with exception) so you get any improvements much much quicker than Stable channel (but still not instantly). Dev releases undergone minimal testing, are a few bits more stable than bare latest builds, but are by no means immune from minor or even critical bugs.
2) Installing Canary builds, which are highly experimental builds derived from latest builds everyday, so they get any fixes (and new bugs) almost instant. Due to their unstable nature, they are allowed to be installed side by side with other release channels.

Users are solely responsible for any damage caused from deciding to use any other-than-official-stable builds.

However for your information as far as I can tell this new media controls are not enabled by default even on Dev channel. In addition to installing Dev or Canary builds you still have to pass command line flags to enable the new media control, and they are likely still buggy given they are not enabled by default even on experimental builds.

Thanks for explaining. I'll wait for it to appear in stable.