How do they do that?

[Palvinder Singh]

Hello all

Im tring to make a music store like itunes (on a much lower scale mind
you ). Im trying to make a little player that streams 30 seconds of
a mp3 track so the user can preview it.

I've managed to do it in flash to some extent, but then i saw MSN Music
(http://music.msn.com/). They have like a play button next to each
track and when you click it, it seems to buffer and then play and i was
woundering how they do this. Having a flash player on the screen
doesn't look as cool as what MSN Music has .

Im using Visual Studio in C# to develop my web project and was
woundering if there are any other methods of streaming an mp3 over the
internet similar to what MSN Music have accomplished.


Regards



Palvinder Singh

 

[Peter Rilling]

The browser knows nothing about C#, so change you thinking to that of just
JavaScript and maybe ActiveX or something else that runs locally on the
client.

Since you know that all this has to happen on the browser, you can reverse
engineer their page. Looks like they call some JavaScript when you click
the button (onclick="if(SF('h')) return
h(this,'cm=PLFEATURED&ce=LaunchPlaylist&hl=CMA+Award+Winners+-+2005');").
Now, what you can do is to download their JavaScript files and see what the
function "h" does.

 

[Guest]

Why don't you try embedding Windows Media Player in an <object .... > tag.
It has many configurable options including the size of the "playlet" that
you see on the page. Documentation can be found on MSDN online.
--Peter