Continuous Flash music player while navigating site

Question

I have a site that includes a Flash music player integrated into the layout. I want users to be able to navigate around the site without interrupting the music. I've done plenty of research and thinking and the following are the options I came up with (keeping in mind I want to be as SEO friendly as possible). Anyone have another idea?

1. AJAX:
   I set up a version that changes the main content div to whatever nav link they click, thereby not interrupting the Flash player. I set it up in the proper search-engine-friendly manner with direct links and JQuery/Ajax functions. If someone goes to site.com/ and clicks the Contact nav link, it loads what's in the main content div on site.com/contact.php into the main content div and changes the URL bar to site.com/#Contact. The same goes for if they go to site.com/contact.php and click About in the nav, it loads the About content and changes the URL bar to site.com/contact.php#About.
   Obviously this opens up a whole new can of worms with AJAX and hash navigation/history issues, and I would end up with people possibly linking to things like site.com/contact.php#About (which I think looks terrible and can't be too great for SEO).

2. Store the Flash player vars somewhere and reload them with the page:
   I'm not sure how to go about this, but I thought about keeping my regular navigation without AJAX and have it so when a user clicks a nav link, before it changes pages it stores the Flash player vars (current song and song position) somewhere, then loads them into Flash when the new page loads.

3. Something with an iframe?

4. Good alternative to a Flash player that will work for this type of application?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Depends how open you are to options, I have done this before but used a pop-up window to house the mp3 player while the user was free to navigate the site. It's either that or an iframe/frame setup. I can't see much else working thats ok with SEO. Reloading the page will at most restart your music.

Answer 2

I ran into the same issue... continuous music is a challenge, even with HTML5. The standard options are to use frames (not recommended) or popups (also not recommend). However, some flash audio players set a cookie with the current position of the song, and use this cookie to seek to that position on subsequent page loads. One such player is http://www.boutell.com/xspf/.

Answer 3

Just tried the Xspf player and yes it does play the song from a page to another at the same point. Unfortunately there's a small gap in the middle. And i tested with blank pages, so with some content it might even be a bigger gap. Test's here: link text

Answer 4

I ended up going with the AJAX option. Sucks for anyone without Javascript, but it does the trick and the site has a nice, smooth feel to it. As long as you implement it in an SEO-friendly way (http://www.ajaxoptimize.com/) I don't see a downside to doing it this way besides the potentially "ugly" URLs. If you don't want to or can't use Javascript, that xspf player seems like the best option despite its loading gap.