New Player!!

[64Guitars]

Thanks everyone. I'm pretty pleased with the new player. It's a lot more versatile than the old one and allows me to create graphic "skins" for different applications. And, in the festival jukeboxes, it has a Shuffle button. In shuffle mode, the play order is randomly selected from the playlist. This works great with BeatlesFest since there are so many songs available.

Nigel: It sounds like you either have a slow internet connection, or the server was acting up (or perhaps a bit of both?). I did notice a few server hiccups around 12:30pm BST today.

Try this when you're having trouble. Immediately after starting the player, click Pause. You should see a dark grey progress bar indicating the loading of the song. When the song is fully loaded (the load bar covers the full width of the player), press Stop to reset the counter to 0:00, then press Play. Since the song is now fully loaded in your computer's memory, it will no longer be dependent on your internet connection or the Songcrafters server and should play perfectly.

For uninterrupted playback, the load bar should always be well ahead of the time bar. Ideally, the song should be fully loaded as shown in this screenshot. If the load bar and time bar are running neck and neck, playback will be choppy (plays a bit, then waits for more data; then plays a bit more and waits again, etc).

By the way, with the old player, some Internet Explorer users said they could not play Blooby's posts which he hosted on his Google site. I'd be interested to know (as would Blooby, I'm sure) whether those posts work in IE with the new player. For example, try this song:

Time:

0:00

Volume:

50

0

 Stop   Play   Pause   Vol   Vol   Mute   Repeat   Download

(Originally posted by Blooby June 13, 2010 in this message.)

Maybe a few IE users could let us know how it works here in this topic.

[Tangled Wires]

Its bloody superb and looks the business, and really like the fact the song title and artist can be display within it. The time bar is a welcome additional also.

[64Guitars]

really like the fact the song title and artist can be display within it.

That's one of my favourite features too. Unfortunately, the only place I can currently get the song title from with attached songs is the filename. So people will have to be more careful about how they name their files before uploading. The player doesn't look quite as impressive when it displays your song title as "T12V2_01". 

If you upload your file somewhere else and link to it with the [singlemp3] [/singlemp3] tags, you can use any song title you like by inserting it into the opening tag preceded by an equals sign.

For example...

[singlemp3="Heart of Gold" by Greeny, Bluesberry and 64Guitars]http://songcrafters.org/community/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=3074.0;attach=2996[/singlemp3]

...will result in this:

Time:

0:00

Volume:

50

0

 Stop   Play   Pause   Vol   Vol   Mute   Repeat   Download

But, with attached songs, there's no tag in the message for the MP3 player, so there's nowhere for you to pass the song title to the player. Perhaps sometime in the future I'll find a way around this limitation. But, for now, we'll just have to name our files the way we want them to be displayed in the player.

[Bluesberry]

Dang that "Heart of Gold" brings back some great memories.  That was a great colab guys, playing along with Tim's superb track.

[Ferryman_1957]

Nigel: It sounds like you either have a slow internet connection, or the server was acting up (or perhaps a bit of both?). I did notice a few server hiccups around 12:30pm BST today.

It was definitely a server problem, because all my other Internet services were fine and going at normal speed. Everything is fine now.

It's an improvement but there is one thing I would really like, which is the ability to loop a track, ie have it keep repeat playing. I like to listen to a track multiple times before I comment and it's always annoying to have to stop what I am doing, find the player window and restart the track.

Damn users, never satisfied, eh?

Cheers,

Nigel

[64Guitars]

It's an improvement but there is one thing I would really like, which is the ability to loop a track, ie have it keep repeat playing.

That shouldn't be a problem. The player happens to have a repeat feature. I just didn't implement it on the single-song version of the player. But I did include it in the festival jukeboxes. When I get a chance, I'll take a look at adding it to the single-song version too.

[Ferryman_1957]

You added it and I only just found it! Thanks a bunch 64G, I really like this feature!

UPDATE: Spoke too soon - it doesn't appear to work. I pressed the "repeat" feature to toggle it on but the song still only plays once. I've tried t his in IE 6 and Google Chrome. Any chance you can look into this 64G?

Cheers,

Nigel

[64Guitars]

Yes, after going to the trouble of adding the repeat button, I found that the damn thing doesn't work. It works for the festival jukeboxes which use a playlist file but not for the single song version which has no playlist (the song's URL is specified directly instead). I checked the forum and website of the player's creator (http://blog.lacymorrow.com/) but couldn't find any information about this problem. Source code for the player is available but it's in Adobe Flash which I don't know. And I don't have the Flash development tools so I can't even look at the source code anyway. I'll see if cuthbert can help. I believe he has some knowledge of Flash programming and access to the required tools.

[Ferryman_1957]

Thanks but don't work too hard....... It's a nice to have but not crucial.

Damned users - always want more bells and whistles!