Monday, August 06, 2012

Found a (provisional) solution for my music player woes [updated]

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MP3 music player

Here’s an update to yesterday’s announcement that my chosen embedded player for all my song posts had recently gone kaput. It turns out that the player itself, the Google Reader player, has pretty much died all over the place, not just for Little MP3 (the website/service I used to host and embed my songs). So now, I needed both a new host for my songs that allows hotlinking (a feature that’s apparently frustratingly rare in file-hosting sites’ free plans), and a new way to put them on this here blog.

For hosting, I ended up choosing FileDen, a simple and nifty site that offers 1 GB in hosting space and 5 GB in monthly bandwidth as part of its free plan. That’s nice and all, but given that my songs are often anywhere from 5-10 MB each, I get the feeling both are going to max out before too long. (Though, at least there’s now a silver lining to this blog’s lacking popularity, I guess. Hee.) On the upside, though, it does afford me much greater control over the uploaded songs, themselves, which is always swell.

As for embedding, my search for a decent audio player (that works) was fruitless, so I resorted to the basic “<embed>” code that results in a plain and rudimentary little player, which can bee seen in action here for ‘Inhuman Theme’. It should work for most browsers (assuming all the proper plugins are installed and whatnot), but I’ve heard that it might not work for those using Chrome, for instance. In any case, I end every song post with an offer to send my songs directly to anyone who requests them, so that should cover any problems caused by incompatibilities.

Neither of these are ideal solutions, at least until Blogger allows webmasters access to their own blog servers for direct file hosting and whatnot (you know, like WordPress does …) and there magically appears a player that’s compatible across all browsers. So, until then, this is all I’ve got. I’m now in the process of updating all my ~ 50 song posts with the new player, so keep an eye here for an update upon completion.


UPDATE: 08/06/12 10:33 PM ET —

I’ve just finished manually overhauling all ~ 50 music posts, not to mention dealing with a bunch of glitches on FileDen’s part that damn near screwed me even more royally than before. If I may be excused, I now wish to die for a while. Maybe before a good movie or something. (Or Burn Notice. Whichever.)