Making an online radio station for your website part 1

Introduction:

Music is considered as the food for our souls. I personally know many people (including me) who love to listen to music while using computer for any reason, be it surfing over internet, developing different applications, checking E-mails, or any other work. So don’t you guys think that adding an MP3 player to your website will be a very pleasing add-on for your visitors? That player will play your selected MP3s continuously one after another like a radio-station without purchasing costly services for streaming your music files over the internet. When the user will be watching your website, he will be enjoying not only the great contents of your website but hear your great music as well. There are two popular methods of doing this.

1)       Purchase costly Real-media, Windows Media or QuickTime Streaming service. All of these services require their respective player’s existence on the target client so many of your clients might not enjoy your hard work.

2)       Use Macromedia Flash MX 2004 to create and stream the MP3s over the internet which requires only the Flash Player to be installed on the target client. According to News.com’s survey report, Macromedia Flash Player is installed on more then 98% computers on the internet, so you can show your work to maximum possible clients.

Requirements for this article:

To complete this article you will need:

• Macromedia Flash MX 2004 (if you don’t have Flash, you can download a trial version from this link).
• A text editor for writing some XML and some HTML. (I am using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004).
• Some MP3s on your system.
• Basic knowledge of using Actionscript and handling XML in flash