Alright, a bit of an introduction. I started off making just a quick but friendly XML based Mp3 Player. Since then, I started to add some features and stuff. I now have what I would consider a pretty advanced mp3 player.
The player locates a file named songList.xml, which is a very simple XML list of the songs:
<songs>
<song>
<name>Automatic Flowers</name>
<location>autoflow.mp3</location>
</song>
<song>
<name>Sweet Child Of Mine</name>
<location>sweetchild.mp3</location>
</song>
</songs>
The player will load up the song, stream it, and use the name specified. There are some pretty nice features to this though:
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Dynamic volume updating: Although this is little, it’s very nice to have. Ya know when you’re dragging the volume bar and you have to let go for it to actually update? This player updates itself once every 6th of a second.
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Proper progress bar: This may be one of the best parts. When you stream a song, you never really get an acurate progress of the song because it doesnt tell you the real duration. I implemented a progress bar, along with a loading bar, to show how far you are out of the entire song, even when it’s not fully loaded, which you can tell by the light blue load bar.
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Nice interface: Thanks to eternalStudios, I have a pretty nice design for the player. It contains four buttons: PREV, STOP, PLAY/PAUSE, and NEXT. See the picture below.
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Organized playing: The player determines whether it can play another song or not. It starts off playing song number 1 and continues through all of the songs until it reaches the end of the list. It then stops. If you try to push NEXT on the last song, it goes to the first song again, but if you try to push PREV on the first song, it restarts the first song. This was coded to simulate the behaviour of a real MP3 Player.
PICTURE:
http://www.kirupa.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=25661&stc=1
From a previous post:
oint A -> That’s the progress bar with the little progress arm sliding along it. The arm is selectable, as it is a button inside a movie clip, so it moves along the bar, but you can also drag it along the amount of the song that is loaded. That means, if only 30 seconds is loaded you cannot drag it to 40 seconds. The blue bar behind is the amount of the song loaded. Now, the progress bar is very accurate so even is the song isnt fully loaded, the bar still moves along the loaded part, it is updated once every 6th of a second.
Point B -> Nice little volume bar there for ya. The little blue slider is hard to select sometimes, so it has a transparent box around it so you dont need to have the mouse 100% on the slider for it to work. It updates dynamically meaning that as you drag the bar, you can hear the volume going down, rather than it changing when you stop dragging.
Point C -> Your main controls. The previous button, Stop, Play/Pause (changes depending on whether or not the song is playing), and Next.
Point D -> Information. The red text says 100, which is the volume of the player, again, dynamically updated while you drag. Then we have the current position divided into minutes and seconds and the current duration in minutes and seconds. The current duration shows how much of the song has loaded, so you can tell if only 30 seconds are loaded in.
Then, there’s the song name up top. It doesnt have any fancy effects where it scrolls along a mask or anything, it just pops up and stays. This stretches across the whole player so you have TONS of room for song names, artist, featuring… etc.
Now, I know this is a long post about features and crap, and I hope you read it, but the main idea here is that I want critique. Tell me which features to add and remove! By the way, I will be selling the FLA to this player, and it was made EXTREMELY customizable, from skinning, to play sorting. It also comes with a customizable PHP frontend that I am working on now. The frontend allows you to specify some HTML formatting code, then in a single file, it allows you to modify the XML file on the fly over the internet. You can add songs, delete songs (also removes the MP3 file when a song is deleted!) and etc… One last thing, how much would you say I can sell this for? Ive been told around $120 if it’s smooth but I want opinions.
