Audio Player 1.2: the podcasting release
After 3 release candidates and a lot of help from some very supportive beta testers, I’m proud to announce the release of version 1.2 of my Audio Player plugin for WordPress. This is quite a significant release because of new features that should be very helpful for podcasters. When I first released this plugin into the public domain, the description included this note: “not designed for podcasting”. Now, after some excellent suggestions from Salim Fadhley who looks after the Resonance FM podcasts site, Audio Player has become ideal for WordPress podcast blogs.
New features:
- Automatic enclosure integration: It is now possible to setup Audio Player to insert a player below all posts that have an mp3 enclosure. This is perfect for podcasters that set their enclosures manually.
- Opening and closing audio clip inserts: An excellent suggestion from Salim who wanted to include a message at the beginning and end of each podcast. You can now set these up in the Audio Player options panel.
- Much better handling of multiple player instances on one page: A lot of people insert many players on a single page. This happens a lot on podcasting blogs because each post has an audio file. Before, you could open several players and they all played the audio at the same time. This certainly created interesting results but could be very annoying for the reader/listener. With version 1.2, opening a player automatically closes all other instances on the same page.
- Feed content options: A lot of people asked for this feature. Instead of the player, the previous version inserted a download link in feeds. You now have 3 choices: replace with nothing, a link to the mp3 file or your own custom message.
- Support for multiple clip playback: It is now possible to send a list of files to the player. Insert a comma-delimited list of urls/file names and Audio Player will play them in sequence. This is still experimental as the player interface doesn’t include next/previous skip controls.
- Replace all mp3 links feature: You now have the option to tell Audio Player to replace all links to mp3 files contained in your posts/pages with a player instance. A few people have registered an interest in this feature and it was easy to implement so I included it in this release. I’m not convinced of its usefulness but hey, it’s another option!
Version 1.2 also includes fixes for a few bugs (including a nasty one that turned the player completely black in IE/Flash 6) and a lot of code improvements. With Salim’s help, I also redesigned the options panel. It is now much more readable. I have also added a preview option to the colour scheme picker and an experimental Check for updates and Upgrade wizard feature. Wow!
I would like to thank Salim Fadhley for his excellent suggestions and help with improving the options panel and Chris Farwell, Amit Gupta, HART and Karl Bedingfield for their help and support during the beta phase.
February 11th, 2006 at 11:28 pm
realy nice plugin dude
am loving every “bite” of it :p
February 12th, 2006 at 5:35 pm
This one is a bit long and in french, sorry…
Voilà ce que j’attendrais d’un lecteur de podcasts parfait: ce serait d’indiquer, au cours de la lecture, les changements de parties à l’intérieur du fichier écouté. Car quand c’est un long fichier genre émission de radio qui dure une heure avec plein de chansons mixées, faut avoir la playlist sous les yeux pour suivre, et si tu n’écoutes que d’une oreille ou que tu relâches ton attention, pas moyen de savoir où tu en es si un son t’attire… Je sais pas si les tags de fichiers mp3 permettent de créer des sous-parties dans un morceau. Si ce n’est pas le cas, alors mon rêve restera un rêve.
Par contre, ta fonction de l’Audio Player qui permet de lire plusieurs fichiers à la suite peut être utilisée pour ça, non? Bon, c’est peut-être compliqué de découper une heure de radio en petits bouts, et faut être sûr qu’il n’y a pas de temps mort entre les parties, mais alors ce serait le bonheur à écouter… surtout si on peut passer d’un “sous-titre” à l’autre dans la version 1.3. (Mais question qui va avec: comment télécharger ça? Une suite de fichiers n’est pas un fichier…)
A part ça, encore bravo !
bises, lolo
February 12th, 2006 at 6:07 pm
Lolo : En effet, c’est une bonne idée mais par contre c’est vraiment pas facile. Tu peux pas vraiment couper un podcast en plusieurs fichiers (tu peux carréement pas d’ailleurs, autrement ce n’est plus un podcast mais une collection de podcasts) et tu peux pas avoir une playlist dans les tags ID3 donc en fait c’est pas possible. Ha ha ha ha! Par contre, ca éxiste pour la radio internet (pas téléchargeable mais “streamed”).
March 5th, 2006 at 8:52 pm
I have “Enclosure integration” checked in the config. But there are no enclosure elements in my RSS or Atom feeds. Any idea why?
April 26th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
This is an awesome plug in…I am having a slight issue tho.
I have the Automatic enclosure integration set, and a player is showing up in every post but my lastes one. I’m guessing there is some error on my mart, but for the life of me, I can’t figure it out.
April 26th, 2007 at 5:27 am
Is there a way to have the player start automatically when a page is opened? (not all players on the page - just the one?)
Thanks for this nice plugin - it’s great!
April 26th, 2007 at 10:01 am
Donovan: add the autostart option to the instance. Check my website for instructions: http://www.1pixelout.net/code/.....n/#runtime
January 16th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
great plugin. thank you.
my wish would be google analytics integration so i can track track usage.