Saturday, February 2, 2008

New Yahoo Music Player Tricks Out Your MP3 Blog

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Yahoo has released an updated version of its browser-based MP3 player, a dead simple music player that uses Javascript to find any MP3 links on your site and then wraps them up in a handy music player complete with s playlist — perfect for MP3 blogs.

Adding the player to your page requires just a single line of HTML code and once it’s present all your MP3 links will be gathered up into a playlist that visitors will see hovering unobtrusively in the bottom left portion of the page. Click the hovering widget will expand it to reveal playback controls, the current song and a playlist with all the files available on the page.

With MP3 blogs fast becoming the best way to discovering new music, the Yahoo music player widget makes it even easier to land on a page and see all the songs at a glance. In essence Yahoo's new tool adds some of the MP3 blog browsing features found in Songbird to your site for those visitors that aren't using Songbird.

Documentation and some of the ways to encode your MP3 links can be found on the Yahoo Media player page at Wikia.com.

One thing to note, although all the interaction from a site owner's end is consists of a pure HTML API, and the behind the scenes work is handled by a Javascript Library, that library still calls on a Flash player object which means this won’t work on an iPhone (or for anyone else who doesn’t have the Flash Player installed).

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