Player problems

Dell and HP still let companies pay to place trial ware, demo ware and crap ware on the PC prior to delivery. The proprietary player is from that family. On the other hand, Adobe applications need to be downloaded and installed by the user, Adobe doesn't pay to play.

If I recall correctly you can add a couple of lines of script to the player link that will query the client for the presence of the Adobe app and advise the user to download and install the needed Adobe app if the app isn't present. Check the Adobe developer site and look for the script, I remember using it a few years ago when I created an on-line orientation site for a local college.

On Pc's The only thing I can think of that plays .pls is winamp. The standard is .wma or .mp3 a lot of streams do .asx aswell.
All open In Windows Media Player. (except for pls)

Yes .pls is the the file extension for WinAmp. When you create a playlist that's extension.

Ken Norris, let me know the type embedded player you have and I'll install it on a test page and try to learn something.

On my site I have an embedded Flash Minicaster which took a few weeks to get working, and now it causes Firefox to crash after 15-minutes but Internet Explorer is o.k.

I also figured out how to start Windows Media Player using an .asx file, and I think it works for everybody, but I have only one tester in the field who says it works alright.

And I have a Shoutcast link which finds the Tune In panel on Shoutcast.

I will be happy to share any of the code details for these player methods.

Player buttons have no standards, for reasons described by SCWIS, but I think the pressure of users will push toward universal solutions.

Add to my last message this additional knowledge. Ken, I visited sonicbridge.us, your station home, and was able to observe that the player appears to be from primcast.com. Have you checked with their customer support?

On my computer the player started playing the second I opened the "Radio" page, which is not what I personally like to find. I prefer to select "Play" on my own choice, as sometimes an automatic audio play interrupts other audio I have running.

Is your player available as open source, or is it part of a package?

I HATE any site that auto loads any kind of audio.
I usually close the site in disgust if I can't stop it.

Ken,

Is the player in question on the page titled " SonicBridgeMain"?

If so , the player " Friday Harbor tinyradio " is working just fine for me and sounds great as well. I was just listening to the weather for your area. It is 12:32 pm est (my time).

I have found that it is best to use two browsers on my computer, although i really really despise Internet Explorer it is my secondary browser while Firefox is my primary.

Nice website too.
Take Care

Heck, you can just click the STOP button on the player. I tend agree about the conflict if you have other audio playing, but virtually all internet radio stations play when you open them, unless they have multiple streams and you have to choose one.

Still, I think I'll change it to play when you click something (if I can ... the thing came that way and I just pasted the code). Makes sense.

BTW, the SonicBridge site is not the one where the station actually is. It's at Friday Harbor tinyRadio. I'm thinking about dumping the other site as it hasn't returned much ... although it is the recording 'arm' of the radio station.

OK, I changed it. I looked over the code, and just removed:
"&autostart=true" from it.

Seems to have done the trick, i.e., it now doesn't play 'til you click the play button on the player. I also changed the web page in my sig.

Problem with the front page is it that with Explorer running under Windows 7, it doesn't obey standard html code. The code shows it's supposed to center on the page ... and it does with other browsers, but not Explorer. It seems that if there's a way for M$ to screw up world programming standards, they will surely figure out how to do it.

I don't have a PC handy, so can someone please tell me how the schedule page appears? How about the Links page?

Thanks much ...

Hi Friday Harbor!

Checked Links and Schedule, and they both look very normal, except for a very small possible question with schedule on "Fri. 5/28 4 PM" where there's an uncharacteristic white hole in the block. Using Firefox.

What is your flash player, and is it open source or pay?

Thanks Carl, I appreciate the comments.

The player is open source AFAIK, came available at no cost as an option with the song display widget, from primcast which is my IP and carrier for Shoutcast.

In addition, I created a SuperCard project which writes a file picked up by the server and sent to the site widget which replaces the track data. I use it for my overnight (after Midnight) broadcast of NOAA Weather (from a scanner headphone output), and for live stuff.

The file gets picked up right away, but when I remove it, the widget display stays stuck ... I have to restart the broadcast to refresh it ... then it again picks up track data. The engineers at Rogue Amoeba (authors of Nicecast) are working on it, should have it solved by the next version release.

By right clicking on the Flash audio player at fhtinyradio.com we find it is JWPlayer4.1.60. A search locates longtailvideo.com where the player may be ordered for $59 and is a video player, but I think can be configured down to audio only. Getting yours free from primcast was a nice reward, Ken N.

I just launched a different Flash player on my website, ffmp3 from Sourceforge, an open source project. It has replaced the FMP Minicaster from draftlight.net which always crashed Firefox on everybody's computer.

One lucky thing is that fmp3 works from a Shoutcast stream by leaving out the playlist.pls in the stream IP address.