The Magnatune web site now automatically detects whether you do not have Flash available in your web browser, and if you do not, an alternative audio player is used (the one built into your web browser).
This should help:
- iPad and iPhone: both now work on the Magnatune web site. One very nice side effect: the audio keeps playing when you leave Safari on the iPhone and the iPad and you can continue using other apps while still listening to the album playing. This unexpected feature is because we're using Quicktime, which (being Apple's own software) can run in the background. To stop the music, run Safari again and click the pause button on the audio player.
- Linux: computers that don't have Flash installed can now play music from the Magnatune web site, without needing to run another audio program. Note that Linux computers do need to have an mp3 decoder installer, however, as I don't have a javascript trick yet for determining whether you can play OGG files in your browser, so I default to mp3s.
Previously, the Magnatune web site used a Flash player exclusively, and so Flash was needed to listen using the web site. The alternative, which still exists, is to use the XSPF or M3U links and an external audio player, but I think this embedded playing is easier.
We also have a native iPad app submitted to Apple, which should be available shortly.
Note that this non-flash method plays the entire album and does not allow you to jump between songs in a playlist (though you can jump to specific times in the entire album). The reason this is the case is that the HTML5 specification does not support playlists, only individual media files. I suspect the HTML5 committee were unfortunately more focussed on video than audio and neglected to think of the need for audio playlists. There are HTML5 playlist players out there, but I've not found them to work consistently on the various important web browsers.
Here are pictures of Safari on the iPhone playing music on the Magnatune web site:
and here are pictures of Safari on the iPad playing music on the Magnatune web site:
Perhaps chapterized m4a (AAC) files would enable jumping between songs in the album. I really like the standard—I join together all my sonatas and suites so that I can skip to individual movements, but I always have the entire work in one file.
Posted by: David Schlachter | April 06, 2010 at 07:55 AM
Nice! Does the detection code from http://pipwerks.com/2010/03/19/html5-video-minus-ogg/ work? If not, you could offer a simple Flash/Ogg/MP3 box and store the choice in a cookie...
PS: The Ogg streams for members have wrong tags. They still contain the PREVIEW ads.
Posted by: Joerg Sonnenberger | April 06, 2010 at 08:17 AM
re: AAC files
I'm unlikely to switch the "you don't have flash" fallback to AAC files as very few web browsers can play them, and I don't have an easy way to detect AAC support. Also, I'm pretty sure that the chapterized AAC format is apple-exclusive, as I've never seen a way to create or decode them on Linux, which is another negative.
Posted by: John from Magnatune | April 06, 2010 at 09:51 AM
re: Does the detection code from http://pipwerks.com/2010/03/19/html5-video-minus-ogg/ work?
Yes, I think the trick that javascript code is using for video-capability detection might also work with audio. Thanks for that, I'll definitely check it out further.
re: PS: The Ogg streams for members have wrong tags. They still contain the PREVIEW ads.
Whoops, sorry about that. I'll fix the code for new OGGs and in a few weeks I'm hoping to get the new super server up, which should have enough spare capacity to re-encode all the OGGs on the server to fix the existing tags.
-john
Posted by: John from Magnatune | April 06, 2010 at 09:53 AM
The trouble with AAC is that just like MP3 it is a patent mind field, which result in many Open Source systems not being able to ship with the codecs by default.
John: If you are redoing the tagging anyway, care to also check that the length restrictions for MP3 tags are not applied to the other formats? At least the AAC versions of a number of albums had suboptimal tags. The genre field tag should be checked too. A nice bonus would be to include to the album cover in the files. Makes playback with the iPod much nicer and 600x600 JPEG compressed to 60KB or so doesn't increase the file size too much.
Posted by: Joerg Sonnenberger | April 06, 2010 at 03:21 PM
Excelent the Quicktime idea for the iphone/ipod! Cheers!
Posted by: Mario Morales | April 08, 2010 at 09:20 AM
As far as I know, you can simply specify alternative sources in the audio element - the browser will then try to choose the one it can play back.
Posted by: Anonymous | April 16, 2010 at 12:03 PM
As far as I can tell, i see no tags in the page (also looking in the source)... do you have a clue about why?
I'm using Chrome on Linux, and other audio and video HTML5 elements on other pages play perfectly fine.
Posted by: Riccardo Iaconelli | April 25, 2010 at 08:15 AM
As far as I can tell, i see no tags in the page (also looking in the source)... do you have a clue about why?
You have to have Javascript enabled for our pages to work. I use a bit of Javascript code to test for the presence of Flash. If no Flash is found, then a simple tag is returned, which should work fine.
If you're looking at the source to see how this works, look for:
if (!hasReqestedVersion) ...
this is Adobe's own javascript code for detecting Flash (they provide it for this use by web sites).
-john
Posted by: John from Magnatune | April 27, 2010 at 06:58 AM