Flash Streaming Audio - Ready-Made consolle for streaming mp3 from your website (free download)

topics: flash streaming audio, flash player , streaming media with flash

In our past article about Streaming Audio with Flash we presented a way, for web developers, to include streaming sound (music, voices...) into their websites.

Our main purpose was to prove that streaming audio was easy to achieve without purchasing expensive fake-technologies or offering tons of money to web agency for this service.

We understand that not everybody is an expert web developer, that Macromedia Flash Mx remains an expensive software, slightly difficult to handle (even if our tutorial was stupid-proof) and learning something new can be hard and time consuming. We understand that our article failed its target somehow...

Here we go again with an easy alternative, easy and funny to incorporate into your pages. You don't even need a Macromedia Flash MX copy!!!!

By taking advantage of the capability of Flash MX to stream external MP3 we have prepared a ready-made mp3 audio consolle in Flash Mx for being downloaded for free.
Below there's how it looks.

This little SWF will stream ANY external mp3 placed in the same directory and named audio.mp3

How it works?

1. First, download the consolle in a specified directory
2. Unzip the archive in a specified folder
3. Take an MP3 (you should already have one on your hard disk) and place it in the same folder of your consolle (stream.swf).
4. Rename your mp3 in audio.mp3
5. Launch the "stream.swf" file

Cool, uh? :-)

Obviously it works online too.

To place the consolle onto your web page, just cut n paste this piece of code in your page code

<object classid="mymovie" width="200" height="19">
      <param name=movie value="stream.swf">
      <embed src="stream.swf"
           quality=high type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
           width="200" height="19">
      </embed>
</object>

Remember:

Even if on your local hard drive can stream 320kbs mp3s, this don't mean that the same happens online. 56k modem users could find frustrating waiting for your large mp3 to buffer before it begins...in best cases, they will hear little by little (aargh...)
So, always keep your audio.mp3 the more compressed you can...

for Vocal files, a 24kbs bitrate is more than enough, and can be heard by almost anyone

stream.swf will stream audio.mp3 only if they are in the SAME directory

You CANNOT stream your favourite singers latest single, remember that playing copyrighted material is phroibited worldwide. If you do it, do it at your own responsability.