I am building a website for someone who is starting a music studio. They want an mp3 player on there so people can hear some music. They also want the songs to have a download and buy link. I usually stay away from any flash stuff, but I think a flash player is the way to go for this right? Is there a good recommended one for this type of thing? I know there are millions out there, but I wanted to check around. Is there a good place that you can host/sell songs from that offers a customizable player also? Thank you.
A:
Personally, I would use YouTube as an on-site music player. This way you can add video to your songs (or even just one or more static pictures) and post them to YouTube, letting them handle the hosting and the player. Embedding the videos on your site is a piece of cake, and they won't use up your bandwidth at all. YouTube's terms of service appear to permit this; see http://www.youtube.com/t/terms.
Selling the songs could be handled with a simple PayPal link. Whenever you receive a payment email (which can include the name/artist of the song purchased), you can email back a link to the download. This link can be to a permanent download (which is the "to hell with it" approach to piracy), or it can be a link to a temporary copy of the MP3 that you place on your site (which you can remove after a day or two or whenever).
MusiGenesis
2009-09-28 15:34:01
+1
A:
The XSPF Web Music Player is a widely-used option. I've also had good luck with Flowplayer.
You should be warned, though, that if you intend for people to purchase your MP3s, they'll be able to see a URL to the MP3 location in the source you call to load a Flash-based player. From there it's only a few clicks to download the MP3 directly. Unless you're running a streaming server, which is significantly more work to set up.
If you'd like to avoid that, perhaps you should have 30-second MP3 samples of your songs.
JoshMock
2009-10-15 16:01:12