personal juke box

[phantasm777]

can anyone tell me why there is nothing in my personal juke box? do i have to somehow put them there. the few other people's i have seen have thier music in it. just wondering how i go about it? thanks!

[Gritter]

your songs must be hosted at songcrafters.org. If they are, then you should send 64Guitars a personal message to find out about your jukebox..

[64Guitars]

It's because none of your songs are attached to messages here at Songcrafters. They're linked to your posts at alonetone. That's a good thing. I really appreciate it when people host their files offsite instead of uploading them here. Sooner or later, the amount of data uploaded to Songcrafters is going to have undesirable consequences for us. Either our hosting company will start charging Flash Harry a lot more, or they'll downgrade our server making the performance of the site extremely slow. So the more people who host their files offsite, the longer we can avoid those consequences.

Unfortunately, the software that automatically generates the playlists for the member jukeboxes can only deal with attachments to messages. It can't detect songs that are hosted offsite. I hope to fix that someday but it's a big job and I haven't found the time to tackle it yet. It's also a job that I have to be very careful to do correctly or it could have big consequences for the security of the site. So I won't be rushing it.

In the meantime, we do have another jukebox which you can use for your offsite files. However, it's not automatic. You have to create a playlist containing the URL of each song along with the song's title.

Here's the jukebox page:

https://songcrafters.org/Festivals/mp3player.html

You can create a playlist in any plain-text editor such as Windows Notepad. The format of the file is one song per line with the URL of the MP3 file at the start of the line, followed by a "|" character, then any text you want to appear as the song title in the player. You'll need to copy this file somewhere on the web. One option is to attach it to your "Introduce Yourself" message. The only problem with that is that the URL of the file will change every time you alter the file. Then you'll have to change any links to your jukebox to include the new URL.   * A better option is to keep your playlist file on some free web server such as FileDEN where the URL won't change every time you change the file.

Once you've got a playlist file stored somewhere, you can link to it with the jukebox URL above, followed by a question mark and the URL of your playlist file. For example, I have a playlist file stored here:

https://songcrafters.org/community/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=4443.0;attach=14280

If I wanted to post a link to the MP3 jukebox with this playlist (in my signature, for example), it would look like this:

https://songcrafters.org/Festivals/mp3player.html?https://songcrafters.org/community/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=4443.0;attach=14280

Of course, it doesn't have to be such an ugly-looking link. You can do something like this instead:

[url=http://songcrafters.org/Festivals/mp3player.html?http://songcrafters.org/community/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=4443.0;attach=14280]Play My Personal Jukebox[/url]

which looks like this:

Play My Personal Jukebox


* Note: Disregard the comment about hosting your playlist file offsite for now. I just realized that the playlist file has to be at Songcrafters because of a limitation of the MP3 player. When I get some time, I'll look into that to see if there's any way I can make it work with offsite playlists. Either that, or I'll try to find a way to allow members to save their playlist here without having the URL change every time they edit it.

[64Guitars]

I forgot to mention that everyone has a link to "My Latest Song Posts" under their avatar. This will list the first message of each of your topics in Original Songs and Cover Songs, which should be a song. The good news is that the player will be shown for each of your offsite songs so people can listen to them, although only one at a time. Conversely, the player is not shown for songs attached to messages.

If you do decide to create your own jukebox playlist, "My Latest Song Posts" is a good way to find your songs and get the MP3 file URL (by editing your message).

[phantasm777]

ok, that makes sense. i'll just leave well enough alone. i've had my own site for quite some time, so i knew if i hosted my mp3's, it wouldn't put a load on this site. i can live with things as they are. thanks for the explaination.