I have been studying web development now for a year and have designed my own site to host my music compositions.
I think flash is best for streaming the audio or (in my case)
a progressive download. Quicktime and windows media player are unreliable and in most cases users give up.

What are your views on this?

Take a look at my website, any feedback would be much appreciated.

[more music to be added when i get a chance]


sean


sjqproductions.com

Hi Sean,

Good luck with your site - good to see initiative in action.

SOS developed a Flash-based MP3 Player for our anniversary DVDs and we adopted it for website audio playback since then. You can hear/see the streaming Player in action (at the top) on this unlocked old Mix Rescue article:

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/aug06/articles/mixrescue2_0806.htm

We came to the same conclusions about unreliability of QT and WMP and given Flash's prevalence for adverts, it is widely available should anyone NOT have it already installed in their computer.

Do you drive your Player with an XML playlist?

One tip we just discovered on this month's Mix Rescue, was that MP3 audio files employed within Flash objects need to have a sample rate that's a multiple of 11.025 (11.025 kHz 22.050 kHz or 44.100 kHz) before you convert it down to MP3.

If you direct link to MP3s in HTML pages, it cares not a jot about the original sample rate as Quicktime and Windows will simply play them and they sound correctly pitched. However, if you encode your MP3s from, say, a 48kHz mix within your DAW (like we did in Logic Pro this month) then Flash SWF players will NOT replay them at the correct pitch, and the 48kHz sourced-MP3 will play back slower than it should do, since Flash is limited to 44.1kHz maximum sample rate we discovered this week.

Be warned.

cheers,
Ian G


This only came to light when

--------------------
SOS Gear Videos now screening on www.SoundOnSound.tv
SOS Podcasts

Thanks for your feedback...

All tracks are 44.100 kHz and compressed at a variable bit rate.

The tracks are fed in with xml, however I am considering mysql (database driven), as this is how i update the textual content on the site.

php & mysql

cheers,

sean

Sean,
I looked at your website and I think it is great. It's very sleek and appealing.

One thing I find is that it is not idiot proof. I think there should be an item in your main navigation (HOME, ABOUT, CONTACT) that goes straight to the music, called LISTEN or MUSIC or something obvious. I understand it is redundant, but that left hand navigation is usually the first thing the eye is drawn to.

There's also a dead link - if you click on the SJQ logo, it goes to Index.php instead of index.php.

--------------------
gentle robot - chapel hill rock band

great advice and thanks for pointing out the link problem.

working far too hard these days.


sean

Hi, I decided that flash was what I was going to use too!
mainly so that I could make my own bleep.com style transport bar.... haha.
I am setting up an account with pay2access.net which enables people to buy an mp3 buy texting from their phone (a pre-determined premium rate sms). as well as a link to the label shop and online marts like itunes, amazon digital etc...
here is the site:
yeticave
(i haven't ironed out the kinks with the pay2access forms so they are not up yet!)

--------------------
jaybharadia.com

I like that site!!!

So is that a flash player you're using, it starts instant, not like some sites where it seems to neeed to buffer-up or whatever

forgot to mention - music's good too!

michael b

Hi, thanks for the love dude, yes it is a flash player I designed and the audio is relatively high quality mp3 so I needed a streaming device, so that people would react just like you did "wow that was fast!" without it sounding like a bag of scissors (32kb mp3 is NOT an audio format, its a dog detterent!)
I was searching on google for something and I found this thread, so I post a very delayed response!
jx

--------------------
jaybharadia.com