I'm hating mp3 attachments.

[DT Chris]

I'm hating mp3 attachments.

For me, they're so slow because most of the time they won't stream, and I have to download each of them just to listen to them. Since I don't have the time or patience to do that, I'm not bashing as many songs here.

[brandondrury]

I'm glad you brought this up. It's a point I would not have thought about.

We obviously have differences in workflow. When I'm bashing songs/mixes I open up 3 or 4 windows and start downloading to my desktop while I'm listening to another song. I also thought that the time consuming part of reviewing a song was taking the 5 minutes to listen to the song.

Isn't there a way that Media Player can almost immediately start playing a mp3 file even when it hasn't downloaded yet. I should look into this. There may be a very simple way to immediately hear a song without waiting for a full download.

In the long run,the eventual goal is to have a dedicated system for Recording Reviews so that a user would have a profile, people could vote, bla bla bla....all the good things about Myspace only better and none of the crappy things.

Thanks for taking the time to illustrate this problem. Obviously, I want this site to be as effective as possible so member feedback is ALWAYS appreciated.

[DT Chris]

I don't know what criteria needs to be met to have it open up and play automatically in Winamp/Media Player. All I know is that when I click on an attachment.mp3 file, it will not play right away. I will always offer to play in Winamp, or save to disk, but the options are greyed out 90% of the time.

This causes me to go back, right-click "Save-As" and download to hard-disk, then open it up in Winamp.

Obviously not as convenient as simply clicking a link that streams right away, 100% of the time.

[brandondrury]

Okay, gotcha. I'm working on it.

[.tom]

i'm a long time mac user so, i don't no if the following is relevant, and.. i'm not sure i follow all ur comments but.. 1)quicktime is available/free to use. worx with windows too. if ur browser is directed to use quicktime to handle mp3 files, the song will open in ur browser window and can begin playing the song with as little as 2% of file info downloaded. so, tho there may be something to be done from the host end, ultimately, the file will be handled as defined by the user.

[brandondrury]

if ur browser is directed to use quicktime to handle mp3 files, the song will open in ur browser window and can begin playing the song with as little as 2% of file info downloaded.

This is what Media Player normally does, too. However, there is something about the way the forum handles attachments that forces us PC guys to download the entire song. I've got a Quicktime alternative (I've had some pretty tramatic experiences with Quicktime on my PCs in the past). Let me see if the forum attachments will play immediately with it.

Nope. No matter what I do, the file has to download first.

Brandon

[richiebee]

You can open media player and paste in the URL... it will then stream.

[brandondrury]

Really? I'm not exactly sure where I would paste a URL in Media Player. This may be because I'm running version 9 or whatever came with SP2. I don't upgrade anything unless I'm already having problems.

Okay, here's the URL in question

http://forum.recordingreview.com/attachments/f11/164d1192725946-return-oblivion-david-williard-return-oblivion.mp3

Okay, and here's a linked up version:
http://forum.recordingreview.com/att...n-oblivion.mp3

Can anyone get this to play immediately? I'm thinking my forum software is setup in a way that everyone has to wait to download the files, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

Brandon

[richiebee]

Right click the link, choose COPY SHORTCUT.

Go to WMP, File > Open URL, Paste. It then streams.

It won't however stream from clicking directly on the link. This is either an issue with your host (its part of the server set up that allows streaming), or the forum software. Since you can stream it by pasting in the URL into WMP, the server must allow streaming... therefore, it must be the way your forum is set up. I say "must", but I mean "is probably".

[.tom]

my brwser identifies this file as a "png" file. it also lists the file name ending in ".mp3" get the "png" script out of the code and this file should i.d. as "mp3" and open in the browser.