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Are you still building that SonghaySystem.com MP3 player?

Yes. I am still building that custom MP3 player as a replacement for the one being used at kintespace.com. This project predates YouTube.com and still exists in full view of great tools like XSPF Jukebox, JW FLV Media Player and ASTRA AudioPlayback from Yahoo! Also, I would still build my custom solution and use a promotional tool like ReverbNation at the same time.

The number one reason why I am still devoted to my little project is because of my use of Flex and my decoupling of “concerns” in the application. In my audio application there are three major concerns: (i) loading data about audio files, (ii) playing and controlling the audio files and (iii) showing the player interface.

My work intends to cleanly separate these three concerns. You can see (and hear) this in my latest raw sample presentation at SonghaySystem.com. This Flex sample has no visual interface. All you can do is click links in a text box to control the audio. You should assume that I am using XSPF as the data format to load the audio. I have waited and worked for years to finally see this work done—but the timing is somewhat ‘right’ because this work depends on Flash 9 (which was born in June 2006 so “waiting” upwards of three years for this version to get around the Web is not that horrible).

These (known) items must be complete before I really celebrate:

  • Connect my Flex-based GUI to my player and release that as a sample.

  • Use JavaScript to connect XHTML playlist data to my Flash player and release a sample with this working.That’s a total of three samples to establish this new audio player as a viable replacement for my old code that I announced in 2005 and upgraded in 2006. And it is important to explain to me (because I do forget you know) why I do not consider myself as one “reinventing the wheel”:

  • Almost all Flash audio players are presented as solutions for artists and publishers who do not have any concern for traditional software developer practices—only the Yahoo! Flash tools come close to this particular form of professionalism.

  • My solution uses the Adobe Flex SDK directly from Eclipse. No Flash. No FlexBuilder. I would throw out a figure like 99% to describe the percentage of the Adobe customer base not working like this—and Adobe will mostly like continue to discourage this vendor-independent behavior in spite of their Open Source relations.Strangely, I would not recommend using my solution for the “average Joe” who wants to get audio up on the Web. I would tell them to do what millions are already doing on YouTube.com: they just upload a single-frame video (with an audio track of course) to ‘smuggle’ the audio into the YouTube.com system. You can then use the YouTube.com APIs to “skin” a custom audio/video player as a frontend to YouTube.com. I’ve got a rudimentary sample on SonghaySystem.com that just scratches the surface of this investigation. So I will take the YouTube.com route as well as my own…

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