Strathview Consultants

MP3 Player with XML Playlist Version 2

About this MP3 player

I programmed this MP3 player in Adobe flex3 based on an mp3 player from pxldesigns. The aim was to have an mp3 player with an XML playlist with an unlimited number of songs that could load on a wikidot site and did not need complicated codeblocks and parameters but just the playlist, the mp3 files and the flash mp3 player called from an iframe on the page.

The track listing is sortable on any column, ascending or descending, by clicking on the column heading. The default order is the order of the songs in the XML file.

Files to download

There are 2 files to download. Right-click on the links below and select "save target as…" (IE) or "save link as…" (Firefox) and save to a folder on your PC.

How to install

1. Download the mp3 player and playlist files to a location on your computer.
2. Open playlist.xml with a text editor (Notepad is sufficient)
3. Change the artist and titles to your songs
4. Change the the data line to the name of the mp3 file
5. Save the playlist.xml file
6. Upload the wikidotmp3v2.swf and the playlist.xml files to the page where the MP3 player will be.
7. Upload your mp3 files to the same page
8. On firefox you might need to clear your browser cache with the ctrl+shift+delete and then do a ctrl+r refresh to see the player and perhaps go to a different page then back again (it's one of the odd things about swf files on wikidot pages in Firefox).

playlist.xml

The syntax of the XML files is as follows. The 3 lines for each track just need to be changed. Extra tracks can be added by copying and pasting everthing from <song> to </song>:

<songs>
    <song>
        <artist></artist>
        <title></title>
        <data></data>
    </song>
    ...
</songs>

So for the playlist on this page the syntax is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<songs xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
    <song>
        <artist>Magna Carta</artist>
        <title>Slowbone Jones</title>
        <data>slowbone.mp3</data>
    </song>
    <song>
        <artist>Chris Rea</artist>
        <title>Steel River</title>
        <data>steelriver.mp3</data>
    </song>
    <song>
        <artist>Llewellyn</artist>
        <title>Rhiannon</title>
        <data>rhiannon.mp3</data>
    </song>
    <song>
        <artist>Celtic Woman</artist>
        <title>Panis Angelicus</title>
        <data>panis.mp3</data>
    </song>
    <song>
        <artist>Rob Elliott</artist>
        <title>Evergreen</title>
        <data>evergreen.mp3</data>
    </song>

</songs>

iframe

Add an iframe to your page changing the site and page to the name of your site and the page the player is on:

[[iframe http://YOUR SITE.wikidot.com/local--files/YOUR PAGE/wikidotmp3v2.swf width="485" height="405" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"]]

Playing your mp3 songs

Just click on the song to play it.

Things to note

• Due to the current lack of streaming capability in flex, although the song will start immediately the buttons at the top of the player will be greyed out and not available until a song has fully downloaded which will be several seconds into the song.

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