Flash Audio Player
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- 17 Responses
- scarabin
i'm looking for a flash streaming audio player for a website that supports multiple tracks, has your standard controls, and preferably has one of those bar visualizers. just something basic and small.
anyone got one laying around, or know of one i can download?
- mrdobolina0
bar visualizers, like freq levels?
- scarabin0
yeah.
all the ones i've been able to find have fake looped animations.
- scarabin0
i'd even be able to cope without that feature if it was a good little player.
i need it to stream a few selectable bg tracks on a website.
- mrdobolina0
scarabin, would this work? in the popup.
- scarabin0
yes, yes it would.
i can add a visualizer myself.
- mrdobolina0
which email scarabin?
- scarabin0
thanks, man.
- mrdobolina0
emailed you scarab.
- shaft0
mrdobolina, I see you skipped play progress indicator. Is there any good way to calculate progress position of a streamed song other than setting the song length manually?
- zakcoop0
I see that your player has the same problem as most. When an MP3 is called from Flash and begins downloading, then a user clicks the "next" button and another track begins loading the first track keeps loading, and so on, and so on ...
So, ultimately what happens is that the browser keeps downloading multiple tracks, but the user does not know that.
To see what I mean, use Safari to browse your Friday Jams player or a player I made for one of my clients (www.willyporter.com). Try skipping between songs before each one downloads completely and open the "Window -> Activity" window in Safari so you can see the progress of the MP3 downloads. You'll notice that you can have multiple MP3s downloading at the same time if you skip through the songs quickly without letting them load quickly.
As far as I know, Macromedia is aware of this problem, but it's a real bummer since the bug soaks up bandwidth in a hurry.
We can never assume how users will interact with an MP3 streamer or player, so this bug really sucks.
Just a side note. I really became frustrated when I tried creating an efficient player. Ultimately, my solution at willyporter.com is a good one, but suffers from this bug like every other Flash MP3 player out there.
I digress.
Aaron Cooper
- shaft0
What if you don't load a track, but a movieclip that loads the track into itself? Skipping to another track unloads the movieclip and loads it again with a different mp3. Did you try this?
- zakcoop0
Most flashmeisters, like myself, have moved on to players that load MP3 files directly and use an xml playlist. This provides for easier maintenance and is really a better way to go rather than loading SWFs all the time.
It's really something Macromedia needs to remedy.
Dynamic loading of text, audio, images, etc... is really what allows designers/developers to leverage Flash as a truly dynamic development tool that gives clients CMS options on the back end as well. Reverting to use of SWF files is really a step backward. Maybe Macromedia will step it up in Flash Player 8.0 ... guess we'll see.
If there was a fix for this, someone like Moock (see: http://www.moock.org/asdg/codede…) would have figured it out. He has some nice code samples, but I've not seen any definitive fix.
- scarabin0
we should get a bunch of people together on this and build the pimpest audio player on the web.
- shaft0
"Most flashmeisters, like myself, have moved on to players that load MP3 files directly and use an xml playlist. This provides for easier maintenance and is really a better way to go rather than loading SWFs all the time."
Of course, but what I meant was to load an external swf with a variable passed that informs the swf what mp3 to load. When you want to skip tracks, you unload the mc and then load it again with a different var so it loads a different mp3. The vars can come from an xml file, sure. Did you try this? Does it stop streaming the mp3?
Another solution would be loading the swf with track into an invisible html layer. Deleting the layer with the swf in it possibly could stop streaming. I don't know, these are just loose ideas.BTW, do you have a solution to calculate progress of playing a streamed file while it's not fully loaded?
- zakcoop0
Indeed agreed.
- shaft0
So loading into an invisible iframe and then killing the iframe doesn't help either?
Thanks for the preloader