Music player for myspace.

[Chris]

I'm tired of uploading samples to myspace and instantly having them sound like ass. Anybody know some code or whatever for a player that would:

1) Not allow back door downloading (or linking)
2) Still count plays

I can host all of the mp3s and such.

[theblue1]

Jeroen Wijering has a good Flash based player. It doesn't count plays or anything, though. You host the media and the player on your own website and then use it as a 'widget' on your MySpace page, just about like you can use the Soundclick media player on your MySpace page. (But if it's your own website, you can probably just use your site stats to check the file requests.) Also, you can use it to access media on 3rd party sides as well. For instance, I have a player on my MySpace page that accesses the Flash player on my website server, along with the XML playlist for it, but the playlist points (mostly) to media files on Archive.org, where audio for my podcast lives.

Speaking of SC, its free accounts allow 128 Mp3s which ain't super hi fi but sure beats what sounds like 96 kbps on MySpace.

I'm not sure but I think I've had better luck feeding a VBR Mp3 into MySpace's ugly maw than the 128s I used to use to upload to SC. (And, in fact, I've taken to uploading VBRs to SC, too. I'm not absolutely sure they sound better but they don't sound worse and I could fool myself into thinking they sound better, which is clearly good enough for a lot of folks. )

[Old Goat]

I am not pimping for SC, but if you don't mind paying 10 bucks a month for a VIP page, you can upload 192kps files. You also get more detailed stats and no ads on your page, which is why I do it. I keep threatening to go back to a regular page, but I spend that much on way stupider stuff that doesn't tell me anything about who is listening!

[theblue1]

Definitely not pimping SC either -- in fact I'm a freeloader, there, myself -- but you can also sell you music at SC (as you can at a lot more places, including MySpace, of course). One nice thing is you can get your pricing down as low as $.25 a song, which might fit some folks' egalitarian sentiments better (and might be a more realistic price for a DL'd song in today's world, period, indie or signed, known or unknown).

[kingchong]

yep SC vip here also!! i like it a lot i also have it on my website so i can still keep count of my plays.. i have a flash website template that im workin on and cant figure out how to put the SC player in it tho.. but it does work great for myspace


chuck

[johnjm22]

There are tons of Music Networking sites out there that are similar to Myspace. All of these sites usually have their own audio players, and you can usually embed those players on other sites like Myspace.

Examples:

iSound.com
AudioStreet.net

Virb.com
Motagator.net
NextCat.com
Reccenter.com


You'll notice with some of these sites like iSound and Audiostreet there is an embed code placed directly under the player. With the rest of the sites, you may have to view the page source and "rip" the player code in order to embed it on your Myspace page.

Keep in mind, you'll have to create a profile on these sites and upload your music in order to use the player.

I would recommend iSound. The player sounds decent, and is easy to embed. Unfortunately, it's not the best looking. The Virb player on the other hand, is probably the best looking, but is difficult to embed. You'll have to manipulate it to get it to work.

Here's my Bands iSound and Virb pages: iSound.com/chrysalis_ca Virb.com/Chrysalis

[theblue1]

Originally Posted by kingchong

yep SC vip here also!! i like it a lot i also have it on my website so i can still keep count of my plays.. i have a flash website template that im workin on and cant figure out how to put the SC player in it tho.. but it does work great for myspace


chuck

When in doubt, an iframe?

I hope you understand the implications of (apparently) developing your whole site in Flash: navigation issues, backbutton issues, search engine issues, bookmarking issues, not to mention user antipathy to heavily Flash sites.

That said, a good Flash animation that doesn't hang up the visitor waiting, waiting, waiting for it to load can be really cool.

[Chris]

I'll check out all these places. The reason I wanted a raw one to use my own mp3s is because I prefer using 192 or higher.

[kingchong]

Originally Posted by theblue1

When in doubt, an iframe?

I hope you understand the implications of (apparently) developing your whole site in Flash: navigation issues, backbutton issues, search engine issues, bookmarking issues, not to mention user antipathy to heavily Flash sites.

That said, a good Flash animation that doesn't hang up the visitor waiting, waiting, waiting for it to load can be really cool.

i think ill save the flash template for my studio once i get it up and running. after messin with the flash template for a while, i dont think it is an appropriate site for music. and with the issues you mentioned, like the search engine and stuff, ill just integrate a few flash tidbits here and there into my new site to make it more appealing but not kill the functionality.

[theblue1]

Originally Posted by kingchong

i think ill save the flash template for my studio once i get it up and running. after messin with the flash template for a while, i dont think it is an appropriate site for music. and with the issues you mentioned, like the search engine and stuff, ill just integrate a few flash tidbits here and there into my new site to make it more appealing but not kill the functionality.

That makes sense to me.

Flash is great for animations and it's really come a ways for creating front ends for simple media players but it's less than ideal for a full website, to my way of thinking.

(That said, you can get around some of the issues I cited with a fair amount of planning and some special Flash coding... but one is then going to all that trouble to do something that HTML already does well. Throw in CSS and maybe a little javascript and you'll be surprised just how much of the small-f flash of Flash you can get without even using it. One of my coffeehouse friends who is a full-time Flash designer was marveling at a zooming/resizing 'lightbox' effect on my site and thought it was Flash. It was actually an open source javascript-based utility called Shadowbox.)

[kingchong]

yea my buddy runs a few high ranking sites and he quoted me this "Don’t use the flash to tell the story, use it to enhance the story. If you are trying to sell a product, leave the important information in the HTML of the page, but use the flash to emphasize the product by either displaying it, or pointing out the benefits. your flash should be complementary and not too overwhelming." i just threw the site i have now together in like 30 mins, but now i want it to be a little more interesting/professional.. sorry to change the topic of the original post.


chuck

[theblue1]

Originally Posted by kingchong

yea my buddy runs a few high ranking sites and he quoted me this "Don’t use the flash to tell the story, use it to enhance the story. If you are trying to sell a product, leave the important information in the HTML of the page, but use the flash to emphasize the product by either displaying it, or pointing out the benefits. your flash should be complementary and not too overwhelming." i just threw the site i have now together in like 30 mins, but now i want it to be a little more interesting/professional.. sorry to change the topic of the original post.


chuck

[bold added]

I agree with your pal. Use Flash at what it's good for.

With regards to your site, it's a good start. I think you'll find that margins are your friend. And you'll probably find left (or even right) justifying is easier to read for more than a few lines of text.

That said, I noticed one aspect of your page that's broken -- your style sheet (CSS) file include points to a folder on your own machine -- not a CSS file on your web server. Get that reference to your C:\ drive and documents folder out of there (and just make the CSS file reference relative like your images and other pages, etc) and I suspect some of the styles you thought you were applying will show up. (There are some CSS specs in the file headers themselves, which is why your CSS mouseover links work.)

Anyhow, good start.

[drakewire]

To answer your questions, no if you upload to myspace it can be downloaded. The same with every flash based player on the internet... they all are based on XML markups, so every song can be ripped in that regard, let alone if someone has a program like Mp3stream rip, it can record in mp3 format any song thats played. As far as branded players that allow you to upload more than one song and are compatible with myspace,
Reverb nation is good as is Uber.com, Uber.com is awesome because there is no limit of tracks or bandwidth considerations. So you can upload a 256bit rate and it will stream at 256.... So thats pretty cool.
As far as play counts though, Reverb Nation allows counts... So sometimes thats the better option, however its limited to an Mp3 which is less than 10 minutes long and or 8MB. But they dont downsample....