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03.14.04 03:54 PM

this goes out to trent...

in an effort to make my site more user friendly for those w/out loads of plug-ins, a hi-speed connection, and a powerful 'puter, i'm testing out an audio player. you must at least have a flash player plug in to see the player, and how well you can play the selections will still be dependent upon your downloading abilities. but that shouldn't really be a problem, b/c right now you're only getting 10 sec. samples. i'll either do some php hacking to change that, or i'll be looking at more solutions.

let me know how it works.

after playing around cross-OS, cross-browsers, with the above player, embedding windows media player, embedding .m3u playlists, embedding .mp3(s), so far i have to say that the flash player is looking like the winner for me. i won't have to worry about adjusting anything for anyone's computer. if i don't figure out a hack for the php to get the tracks to play longer than 10 seconds, then i'm going to have to go for the developer's version.

you see, basically i want to stream. i want to stream open source. i want to use open source tools to do my streaming. i don't want anyone to be able to download mp3s...only streams.

with that in order, for those of you who would like to hear the playlist above, i'll do an a href and an embed. you can either link to it, or it will automatically download to your default mp3 player. some of you might even see a player on the page, if your browser or plug in allows it.

get the playlist by clicking here

i know, i know, there's always radioblog or soundblox, but with radioblog you have to convert the mp3s to swf files and soundblox doesn't exactly look like the player is stored on your own host. the mp3 files are and you can use relative links, vs absolute, but stil..

if i'm going to hack, to be quite honest, i might as well build my own player in flash, and do some of my own scripting. (as if i have time for any of that).

my only problem with all of these playes is that not one of them supports mp4, m4a, or m4u yet.

and this brings me to my other problem, the problem i thought i'd have with MT. i can't just drop some harcore script into the template and expect it to kick. i've had problems with nested tables, with embedding, and a few other things. MT is still cool though. i'm writing here a lot more because . but since i'm a lil bit advanced with the coding skills, sometimes MT holds me back.

i guess when i have a little bit of time again, i'll come back to this task, and perhaps even do the comparisons of radioblog to what i'm using now.

after careful research and testing, i figured out that radio blog is really kind of cool. but there's a drawback of course, it's an app for windows users. i'm not with that, especialy since my main machines are macs. but it's really easy to setup and use as either a pop up or embedded player. (i could find an .mp3 to .swf converter for mac and that'd be cool.)

second thing, mac users will be pissed at me when they visit this page, b/c an .m3u playlist is probably going to open up iTunes immediately. i'm just trying to cover all the basis until i get my music situation fully solved.

but i already think it is with the player that starts off this post. i just have to get the developer's version and i'll be able to enable people to hear full length tracks at their own discretion.

i'm audi like a tt roadster.

posted by lynne | link to this |

 

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