I teaching another web design class with students in our Sound program, and they’ve asked that we cover how to play sound files in their web pages. Makes sense.
1. My first preference is always to see if I can get someone else to do the work — maintain the server, stream the content, and give me an easy way to embed it into my web pages. If your audio content can be incorporated into a video, even with still images, then YouTube or Google Video are natural choices.
2. This is even easier if you have a blog (like WordPress!) as both let you post content directly to your blog from their sites. You can also get dedicated audio and video plugins for your blog, such as the Anarchy Media Player plugin for Wordpress. I’ve played with this one a little bit and it works very nicely. The nice thing with these is, because they’re integrated into the blog tool, they have integrated upload tools, so it is relatively easy for the non-technical (or lazy technical) user.
3. There are also many stand-alone players, mostly based in flash. Some of these are for sale, especially for commercial use, but many are also available free for personal use. This one seems to be very nicely done:
There are also versions setup as plug-ins for Wordpress and other blogging engines. I haven’t played with these, but the straight web page piece is very well done. It includes some code to avoid the security/active X issues that most browsers have with many of these types of players. What happens with many players is you might need to click it twice to get it working, or find that it doesn’t work at all — good for security, but a pain for people trying to use it. This player avoids that problem, will play video and audio content and offers some nice controls.
Of course you could build your own player from scratch in Flash (too much work). Or just link to the file from your web page, which results in the browser deciding how to play the file — in a new quicktime window or in Windows Media Player, both kind of ugly.
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WPMu Development for Education » Blog Archive » Taming FAVICONS on Sep 28 09 at 6:32 am[...] Good embeded MP3 player [...]
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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