Hi guys,
I've been playing around with a new alternative to the default audio players that come with Drupals audio suite of modules. It's in early beta, but, when I showed a client how it worked, they wanted it yesterday.
So, you can see a preview of it at the following links:
http://www.the4ofus.com/classified_personal
http://www.the4ofus.com/heaven_and_earth
http://www.the4ofus.com/fingerprints
Key functionality/ergonomics would be as follows:
- Allows you to "preview all" like on amazon.com
- Allows the user to click to play another song and automatically stops playing the previous song, if another one is clicked. With the existing audio players visitors have to click to stop a song before playing another one.....to avoid 2 songs playing at the same time
- When a song finishes playing it automatically moves to the next song. as opposed to having the user click to play each song
- Avoids the buffering issue which sometimes occurs using the button player that comes with the audio.module
- Volume, pause and play control
- Tested and works with opera, IE 7, IE 6, Firefox (and the new beta)
The audio player is controlled using a mix of mainly prototype and soundmanager2. It's a fairly heavy set of js at the moment but the plan is to trim it down and either create an add-on .inc for the audio.module (if there is enough interest) or integrate it into views, so it can be used for any drupal playlist.
An example of similar functionality can be found at the excellent muxtape site: http://muxtape.com or of course on Amazon.com - here's an example of their "preview all" playlist for REM,
Any comments, criticism or suggestions welcome. Anyone with old versions of safari, please give it a spin and let me know if it works okay on older versions of safari.
I'm hoping to catch the eye of other art & music developers who maybe heading towards the same objective and who may have tackled the above functionality already in a more efficient way.
cheers
Dub