I'm putting together a little website at the moment, and want to embed SoundCloud players for a few tracks. When I've done this in the past, I used the Flash version of the embedded SoundCloud player. This is tried and tested, and very customisable, but of course doesn't work on iOS devices, isn't standards-compliant, and so on.

SoundCloud themselves seem to be encouraging everyone to move over to the new HTML5 player instead, so I thought I'd give that a go. So far I'm not very encouraged. The player is fixed (huge) height, can't be coloured, you can't hide the artist name or track title, in Firefox it randomly seems to ignore the instruction to hide artwork, and my friend who's testing the site says he can't get it to work in IE9. Haven't had a chance to test it on iOS yet, but I'm wondering whether to go back to the old version for the time being. Any thoughts? Any sneaky customising tips that I don't know about? I'm wondering if it might be time to look into the Custom Player, but my heart slightly sinks at the prospect...

I tried out HTML5 audio, including some HTML5 audio players about 6-9 months ago (not Soundcloud, though), and had a lot of trouble with them -- basically they won't work on all browsers. Unless things have rapidly improved I don't think you can rely on them for all the people who come to your site. So I went back to using a custom Flash player, with an alternate page for iOS devices which has HTML5 audio on it (not a player, I just use basic html5 commands, as far as I can remember).

The html5 player I'm using in soundcloud you can change the colours and heights etc same as the flash one the only difference I've seen is the option to hide comments and play count.

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http://www.williammorrismusic.com

Is that the Custom Player, or the standard one? From what I can see, the standard one only supports re-sizing horizontally, while the Custom Player still seems to use Flash in some way.

If you have a link for the embed code you're using that'd be great.

Hey,

Since the HTML5 player uses only HTML, you should be able to style to your complete content it using CSS if you have any knowledge on the subject.

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http://www.pfernandes.com

The width is expressed as a percentage so just choose how much of the page you want it to take up, the height is freely assignable as is the colour code. If you need more control you'd have to go for the custom player, which is based around html/css/js code but with this you can get a huge range of options. Here's a little guide:

http://developers.soundcloud.com/docs/custom-player

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http://www.williammorrismusic.com