Stream? Preload? MP3 Help Please!!

[BlueRhino]

-I'd like to include an mp3 player on a site.

-I'd like the player to start the next song when the current song has finished playing.

-Should the mp3's be in separate .swf's and placed on the main timeline of each .swf? then loaded into a MC?

or

-Should the mp3's be preloaded as part of the main movie and accessed that way.

This sound stuff is quite confusing to me. I'm looking to minimize download times, but don't want my site to get choppy when the audio kicks in.

Thoughts or suggestions?

Thanks a ton
Blue

[Pieli]

Hi!

When you want it to play directly at the end of the prefious track, at least some of it shoul already preloaded. Guessing that ur users would rather skip tracks than fast forward thru ur tracks (can they?), it should be advisable to have them allready loaded to a certain level upon showing the interface or have them streamed alltogether before this is done.

Thats why I would go for the player as a complete swf, all tracks included. U can have them sorted out, ie. preloaded by playcing each in a symbol at a seperate, maybe hidden, timeline to load them at any given time. Either sequentially or all at once.

A nice preloader for this player should do the job of integrating it into your main site.

Greetz, Pieli.

[BlueRhino]

I guess the only difficulty is the fact that the mp3's are on average about 4 meg in size. They are complete songs. How do the 'band sites' play such high quality music? Will streaming the audio slow down animation?

Thanks again!
Blue

[Pieli]

Streaming will definetly slow down animation, but there are different audio embedding settings which allow to favor either the animation or the streaming.

If you want to preload these entire songs, try downsampling them or load them one at a time preventing the skipping of tracks directly. The track has to load a little bit to start, so if you want to play it directly after the 'next' button is pressed, it's gotta be loaded. At least the first 250k.

Pieli.