[LRUG] off-topic: embedded mp3 player, how to?

[Tim Cowlishaw]

On 8 May 2008, at 13:19, Ed Davey wrote:

> Thanks - I'd be interested in learning of your experiences in due  
> course.
>
> For now I'm using the $30 wimpyplayer flash player (http://www.wimpyplayer.com/ 
> ). This is loaded into an invisible frame so that playback isn't  
> interrupted as you navigate around the site. wimpyplayer has a basic  
> javascript api allowing you to load playlists and control the player  
> at a basic level using js.
>

aah ok, that sounds similar to what we've been doing - we have a 1px  
by 1px flash animation that handles the audio, with various methods  
accessible from javascript for player control and querying the current  
playback position etc to update the UI.

>
> Of course the use of a frameset is nasty but I couldn't see how to  
> avoid it in this case.

Yeah - there's not really any getting around that as far as i can see  
- we've spent a lot of time on a system that intercepts clicks for  
local urls and reloads a portion of the page via an AJAX request.  
However, this has been pretty involved (particularly with regard to  
ensuring the browser history still functions), and, in fact, still  
relies upon a frameset in IE i believe. To be honest, it's probably  
overkill if your only reason for doing so is to avoid the player  
reloading.

There's more on our blog here if you're interested, once I've finished  
working on this I'm going to post something more about our  
experiences, and will see if i can release some of our code too:

http://blog.playlouder.com/index.php/2007/05/18/introducing-the-back-button-and-bookmarking-to-ajax/
http://blog.playlouder.com/index.php/2007/08/19/hijax-arent-buzzwords-great/
http://blog.playlouder.com/index.php/2007/03/24/music-chat-and-how-to-put-flash-in-its-place/

Hope this is useful!

cheers,

Tim