Network (not?) Streaming audio solutions?

Question

I want to embed several audio files on my website. I want the file to load but not play until the user clicks a button. I also want ablity to move to places that are not yet loaded, as youtube does. It would be great if I could play ogg, aac, mp4, etc., but I do not expect this to be possible, so I would not want another version to be converted to ffmpeg (or something else)

What can I use to use this YouTube as an audio player?

-edit- sorry guys I was far away and did not choose the best answer on time. I find network (not?) Streaming audio solutions? is the best with sorin closely related to streaming audio (not?) solutions?

Answer 1

I don’t understand why you don’t want streaming? Because this is exactly what I would recommend here. Please note that streaming does not necessarily mean a large, ugly, built-in a la Windows Media, QuickTime or Real Player.

I would recommend using MP3 Audio and Flash using the free JW FLV Media Player , which should do everything you want except for low / high quality, but maybe you can just use two players if you need to.

Answer 2

I would prefer Michael's second sentence with a slight modification:

You can use an open source flash player (for example, XSPF Flash player ) and hack it so that it starts to load sound even before starting playback. Thus, you can get all the sounds on the client after a certain period of time (which depends on the connection between the client and server).

You can also take a look at Soundmanager v2 , which offers tight integration with Javascript, without the need for additional hacks.

Answer 3

Have you seen Wimpy Player ? They have various products: from a simple sound button to a video player with a playlist.

I am not sure about skipping to different parts of the file, but they say that it is programmed using Ajax, and I know that you can set whether it will start automatically or not.

I used this for a while, but later changed something with a simple play / pause button.

(By the way, I don’t understand your interest in the streaming player. If the user first downloads the file, why do you need an interface? Won't they just open it in any way? The program that they use on their computer?)

Answer 4

• If you want to have this in a browser, I suggest switching to something based on Flash (it is much more straightforward for the end user, based on a much better API and has a much better penetration than any media player that you need to count on).
• In Flash, you can download audio / video using two protocols: HTTP or RTMP.
• RTMP is a smooth protocol for audio / video and has close support for document search. It is implemented on Flash Media Server, but also in the open source Red5 . However, this means that you will need to start this server or buy the RTMP service.
• HTTP supports extracting part of the file (by specifying the Range header), but the protocol itself is an agnostic of the format, so if it has a variable bit rate, you will probably have problems. Thus, technically, you should be able to navigate to a file in a section that is not loaded, although Flash may not allow this for ... let's say proprietary reasons.
• mp4, ogg, aac will be problematic even when using Flash. It would be best to convert them to a common format at boot time - I think Flash only supports mp3 up to version 9 and AAC starting with Flash Player 9. ffmpeg and mplayer can process / convert to / from many formats.
• Sorry there is no silver bullet. If you need something flexible, you will have to trade development time and create something flexible (not only a web player, but also magic behind the scenes).