Streaming MP3

[Shovel]

Howdeh,

I'm doing my brother's band a website and I want to have a "Music Player". I'm not into Shockwave flash and that nonsense though, so I'm trying to work out how best to stream an MP3 over HTTP.

Play/Pause/Next/Prev controls will all be JavaScript powered, but how to actually stream the music is harder. I'm wondering if I need a shockwave flash <object> (non-visual) that would take a query string param with the file-name and stream through that.

e.g. musicstreamer.swf?track01.mp3

First up: Is there a better way?
Second: If not, can anyone knock me up such a piece of flash to do this? I can't help feeling that it's a 2 minute job for someone who knows how to do it...

Thanks very muchly,

Ben

 

[Xavier]

Why not just use the WMP controls?

 

[fatbusinessman]

Because (at a rough guess) that completely knocks out all the people who don't use Internet Explorer on a Windows system?

 

[wyrd_fish]

all 4 of them

most people have either WMP or quicktime, and failing that you could also do a download link as well

 

[Shovel]

As Fatty says, this is somewhat defeatist of producing a cross-platform, cross browser website.

/me downloads Flash trial.

 

[Collino]

As Fatty says, this is somewhat defeatist of producing a cross-platform, cross browser website.

/me downloads Flash trial.

Just what i was going to suggest.

 

[Xavier]

As Fatty says, this is somewhat defeatist of producing a cross-platform, cross browser website.

/me downloads Flash trial.

the WMP controls work a-ok in Firefox - it's only Linux users who would suffer, so, we've gone from 4 afflicted pe0ns to one, maybe two?

 

[Shovel]

Still somewhat defeatist of the Internet though. Admittedly Flash is hardly the ideal, but it does at least produce a plug in for every major platform.

The easier (and faster) alternative might just be to link to files, and let people handle streaming through their media player of choice.

 

[Xavier]

Hmm, all the same, right tool for the job and all that - it's a band website, so you have to cater for the majority, not all... your personal bias towards linux is one thing, but if you're going to write something which works for "everyone" then you're neglecting all the netscape 3/4 and ie3 browsers which can't even handle CSS correctly...

 

[fatbusinessman]

No - you just write something so that it works nicely without CSS

 

[Shovel]

Precisely. CSS degrades into the simplest of text browsers/mobile phones/whatever you like. It's why <table> layouts have been abandonned so fast.

I have no bias toward Linux or any platform tbh, just a bias toward an accessible Internet for all that want it. I don't care if it's a band website or government propoganda central, it's open access information.

 

[phlash]

I would stick with the simplest (and IMO most portable) solution - just link to the .mp3 files, making sure they come back with the right MIME type (audio/mpeg - http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3003.txt). There is no point writing browser apps unless you plan on using non-HTTP protocols..