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July 23, 2010 8:21 PM

Please tell me how to code a music player like the one on this web site.

http://www.kingsxrocks.com/
I also like the one on
http://www.spoontheband.com , if ya got nothin' for me on the first one.

posted by herbplarfegan to Media & Arts (6 answers total)

The first one is an Adobe Flash file (the music transport controls) embedded in a mostly-HTML page. The second looks to be a website made entirely in Flash. Without knowing how much HTML or ActionScript you know, I can't give much in the way of exact advice. There are plenty of online resources devoted to learning Flash, including an open-source AS3 compiler (mxmlc) if you don't want to pay for the Flash IDE. You could also look into HTML5 media, but that won't work in older versions of IE. It will work on iOS, though -- choose your platform!
posted by Alterscape at 8:29 PM on July 23, 2010

You can run the Flash object through a decompiler which will give you a rough idea of the assets and some very raw uncommented ActionScript. It won't do you any good if you don't have a Flash development environment though.

There are plenty of free Flash players though, and they all can be customized to various degrees without needing to be recompiled so you don't have to invest in an expensive Adobe product (or grit your way through an open source one) if your basic goal is just to have a player widget on a page.
posted by Rhomboid at 8:39 PM on July 23, 2010

There are plenty of free flash players, which are heavily customizable.
posted by empath at 9:43 PM on July 23, 2010

I can't recommend jPlayer enough - it has support for HTML5 playback and will gracefully degrade to an invisible Flash player.

You build whatever interface you want in HTML/CSS/Images and hook them via jQuery to jPlayer methods.

So you get easy skinning without needing to know Flash, and cross-platform playback even on iOS.
posted by tomierna at 6:45 AM on July 24, 2010

Response by poster: my experience is in html and javascript-- cutting and pasting code, then debugging until it works.

this is a healthy reminder that I need to go back to school and learn all of these terms.

Are there any books that you recommend picking up right away, or tutorials that you recommend I glue myself to?
posted by herbplarfegan at 7:08 AM on July 24, 2010

Best answer: Is your goal to learn about how to write Flash applications, or is your goal to have a music player widget on a web page? Those are two very different goals. If the latter, then check out the 'Demos' page on the jPlayer site, it's all there for the cutting and pasting, or read the 'Dev guide' tab for more detailed instructions. On the other hand if the goal is to learn Flash then that's a much more ambitious project -- you might start with these previous questions: 1 2 3 4.
posted by Rhomboid at 11:55 AM on July 24, 2010