Audio Blog and Flash MP3 Player

Given my new found web space and band­width capa­bi­li­ties I have deci­ded to turn the music sec­tion of this blog from a sim­ple “review and list” pos­ting of my favou­rite albums to a fully fled­ged mp3 blog with inline flash strea­med mp3s and music videos via You­Tube. My ins­pi­ra­tion for doing this comes from the well ver­sed Spi­ked Candy for which I am a regu­lar reader.

Howe­ver the “Radio Blog” flash script used there seems too cum­ber­some for my liking, so I searched around for an alter­na­tive flash strea­ming audio pla­yer. I found two options — both by Jeroen Wije­ring, the first was very simi­lar to Radio Blog, it has a list of songs and you can choose to play them; whilst very nice and highly cus­to­mi­za­ble it did not suit a post by post situa­tion. So I opted for the second, a con­cise pro­gress bar which allows colour and size mani­pu­la­tion (but has no text dis­play), per­fect for my needs.

To check out this neat little script I sug­gest rea­ding the latest posts in the Audio / MP3 blog sec­tion, I have put up three posts so far inc­lu­ding Lulu Jackson’s pre-war blues rarity “You’re going to leave the old home Jim” and a video of Moham­med Rafi’s “Jaan Pechechaan Ho” per­for­med for the Bolly­wood film Gum­naam.

My satis­fac­tion with this script has also lead me to inte­grate it into the forums so that any direct link to a file with mp3 exten­sion is par­sed to gene­rate an inline pla­ya­ble ver­sion and an option to down­load the track. This modi­fi­ca­tion is amongst the many I have added lately, inc­lu­ding the abi­lity to post You­Tube and Goo­gle­Vi­deo inline from the reply box. Now I only wish I could somehow apply these to blog­ger so that I don’t have to add the html every time I want to post something dynamic.