Friday, May 6, 2011

Trying out a different player

In an effort to keep with my own arbitrary standards of Schmexcellence, I've decided that I need to start using an embedded music player that shows multiple tracks.

Since I'm freeloading off Blogspot, I'd love to be able to embed here. I've shown in the first post that I can get ~some~ kind of player working, but I'd like to replace it because it doesn't show the track that you're on, much less the one you're going to hear next.

The one below is XSPF player, and it doesn't seem to enjoy being here. I've beaten it up 7 ways from sunday, and I can get it to say "loading playlist" all over the place, but it never plays anything. Anyone have a clue as to what I'm doing wrong? Turns out I was embedding waaaay too many parameters. Finally settled on xspf_player-0.2.3.

A view of the source code on this page will show that I'm calling the player directly from google sites, and the playlist must be called with a thrice-conjugated auth code which can be gotten by downloading the playlist.xspf file, then right clicking it in firefox downloads  and 'copy download link". This gets me a URL with all manner of auth info on it that the XSPF player can understand.







Why do I want these features anyway? because:

Episode X.1: Intro - 3 mins
Episode X.2: Opening Rant - 5 mins
Episode X.3: Tet recommends GURPS - 6 mins
Episode X.4: A loud discussion about Star Wars ensues - 10 mins
Episode X.5: Five minutes of heavy breathing -5mins

Is better than:

Episode X - 29 minutes that you'll shut off once we hit the starwars segment

I realize that for making playlists on media devices, that's a bit of a bitch, but with inline players on sites, you can skip a segment you particularly don't care about.

Also, not every segment needs to be completed at the same time
so an entire episode might be waiting for a week to be completed, but at least there's SOMETHING there in the meanwhile.

I like bite sized conversations that begin and end in a podcast, with the option to skip over topics that don't interest me. I suspect other folks do as well