I had been working on putting sound into web pages, and wrestling with the problem of browser incompatibility, since the Summer of 2005. Both Mr. Rolande Kendal, of Montreal ("FreedomAudio", "AudioCentric"), and Dr. Mark Huckvale, of the University College of London ("Demonstration of Different Ways to Play a Sound from a Web Page"), were invaluable resources back then. The solutions I came up with (audio players based on now-obscure plugins) were not working as well as I had hoped, so I had to go back and try again in the Fall of 2006.

This time, with the help of Dr. Huckvale's updated page, I came up with a two-pronged, "belt and suspenders"* approach that seems to work quite well.

The first strand relies on a free Shockwave-based streaming mp3 player developed by Fabricio Zuardi. The Shockwave plugin comes with most new browsers as standard equipment, so it has become widely available. As you know, these players come in two flavors: Jukebox and Button. While snazzy, Jukebox Players all seem to have the same fatal flaw. Once you click on a selection, the Player continues on through the entire playlist, unless you explicitly stop it. Also, with a Jukebox, you are collecting your sounds in one place, which implies that they are related:

and so on. (If you'd like to see a Jukebox example, click here: Massage Music Top Twenty ).

Therefore, the Button Player is preferable, as the application itself is small and loads quickly. And, you can scatter your sounds at will throughout the page:

Independent Fife & Drum Co.

'XSPF Player' courtesy Fabricio Zuardi.

Since there is no guarantee that any given User will actually have the Shockwave plugin, and a compatible version at that, a backup strand is absolutely required. Another thing to bear in mind is that many Users are searching the Internet from Work. While they may have the latest and greatest in Software on their Desktop, Company Firewalls and Corporate Policies can be very restrictive towards Active-X Components, so it's a good idea to have a Plan B for your sound files.

I looked at Mark Huckvale's 'AudioButton', tested it against the Gecko & Mozilla browser crowd, and realized that he had come very close to developing a sound player that was universally applicable. Because it was compiled in Java 1.0, it was still compatible with every version of the JRE that I could find to test it against: Netscape 4.7.2, 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, and 8.1, as well as Firefox and Opera. It also works in Netscape 7.0 on the Apple Macintosh.

Yes, it uses Sun's old .AU format, but despite the dismissive comments about "low fidelity" and "voice only", I have found it to be more than adequate for on-line music samples. Only someone who has to listen to their Herbert Von Karajan and Bernard Haitink on a tube amplifier is going to care about the difference between the .mp3 and .au version of a song played through a PC**.

Middlesex County Volunteers: German '69

Kevin J. O'Neil: Let Me Go

'AudioButton' courtesy Dr. Mark Huckvale, UCL.

 
One outstanding problem was stopping the sound playback. The sound sample might be very long, or the User might not want to listen to it anymore. Clicking on a Button simply makes the music start playing again, and if you click on a different Button, you will soon have multiple sounds all playing at once.

Using Javascript to make an external call to the Stop() method of an applet is easy in IE, so of course it won't work for Netscape & Co. For a while, I experimented with a single Stop button that called Javascript to perform a soft reload:
     function Estop() { history.go(0); this.focus(); }.

Click Here to Stop:

This actually worked quite well, but it seemed like it might not be the most elegant solution. So I took the liberty of revising Dr. Huckvale's AudioButton Applet by adding both a Stop function and two more image variables. This produced a three-state button: 'Play', 'Playing', 'Played'. Then I added a (File) Length Parameter. Using this, the Applet can tell, without the Button being clicked, when to stop and switch the Button display from "Playing" to "Played". The end result was compiled in Java 1.0.2, so as to retain the upwards compatibility:

Independent Fife & Drum Co.

'AudioAladdin Player' by Michael D. Cohen.

Click here to listen to:  Bulgarian Music  or  Punk Music .

All the gritty technical stuff is coming soon. In the meantime, if you have any questions, you can contact me by e-mail.

But, since progress marches on...here's a cool, cool demo of what you can presently do with several free Adobe Flash
players, as well as AudioAladdin:  Story Demo.

Mike Cohen
Woburn, Mass.