RapidWeaver FAQ - Music
How can I embed music to my RapidWeaver created site? How can I have people listening to it not only on one page but have the music to continue no matter which page they are looking at?
That’s what this FAQ is about:
or
Note that you're not allowed to publish any music to your website of which you don't own the copyright or don't have the permission of the copyright owner to do so or you pay a royalty to the copyright holder. If you do publish music to your website without the right to do so you don't HAVE to but you COULD get sued! Putting music on a website means that you're providing the music to others who could easily download it even if you don't want them to do so. Downloading it is not illegal, providing it is illegal (have a look at the Note at the bottom of the page about DRM Free music you buy on iTunes)
Unless the music was created and published under Creative Commons License (What's that?) wich means that you’re free to share it.
To find some creative common licensed music go to:
Jamendo.com or have a look at the following blog post at largeheartedboy.com
Note that people usually already listen to music with iTunes, radio, ... while browsing the web. Hence having the music playing automatically on your website and not letting the visitor choose whether he wants to listen to music or not should be avoided. Give the user control of it.
CHAPTER 1: How to get the music online
CHAPTER 2: How to build a Flashplayer
2.1 Using myflashfetish
2.2 Alternative 1
2.3 Alternative 2
2.4 Note about compilations
Chapter 3: How to insert a Flashplayer into a page
Chapter 4: How to have people listening to the music no matter what page they’re on
Note: about auto-popup windows
Chapter 5: Using QuickTime player instead of a flash player (which I wouldn't recommend)
Chapter 6: Note about iTunes music
CHAPTER 1: How to get the music online
1. Search for the music you want to play
2. Download it and put all of the songs in a folder
3. Upload the folder containing your mp3's to your server (example: create a Folder named Music and in that folder a folder called Playlist1, Playlist2 and so on if you want to have more than one playlists)
- For MobileMe go to the Finder menu and select Go/iDisk/My iDisk/ or hit Schift+Command(Apple)+i and then go to /Web/Sites/. Drop your file into the "Sites" folder or create a folder you call 'Music'
Entering: http://web.me.com/username/filename.mp3 or http://web.me.com/username/Music/filename.mp3 or http://web.me.com/username/Music/Playlist1/filename.mp3 in your browser should bring up this file.
- If you're publishing to folder put it in the main location on your server using an ftp program
Entering: http://yourbaseurl.com/filename.mp3 or http://yourbaseurl.com/Music/filename.mp3 or http://yourbaseurl.com/Music/Playlist1/filename.mp3 in your browser should bring up this file.
CHAPTER 2: How to build a Flashplayer
I always recommend to use a Flash player if you want to add music or video to your website instead of using Quicktime. Mainly because not everybody has Quicktime on their computer (especially Windows PCs). But almost everybody has Flash since we’re living in the YouTube era. Who didn’t visit YouTube at least once in a lifetime? In addition to that it comes pre-installed on Mac and PC.
There are a lot of Flash players around.
2.1 Using myflashfetish
1. Sign up to http://www.myflashfetish.com/ (that's the one I used to create my players) or any other platform where you can build a Flashplayer with your music
2. Make a playlist
- Choose a skin you want to use (appearance of the player, I use the iPod nano because I love it)
- There will be fields saying MP3 Title (don't use special characters like è ä and ' & and so on) and MP3 URL (http://yoururl/Music/Playlist1/filename.mp3 or yoururl/Music/filename.mp3 or whatever)
3. At the end save the playlist and get the code
2.2 Alternative 1
An alternative to the myflashfetish.com player is the one used by Roddy McKay on this page.
Instructions can be found here.
(If you need help, if something is not clear in those instructions please add a comment at the end of this page to help me helping my visitors. Thank you.)
2.3 Alternative 2
Have a look at this.
You will find instructions on the same page.
(If you need help, if something is not clear in those instructions please add a comment at the end of this page to help me helping my visitors. Thank you.)
2.4 Note about compilations
Alternative 1 doesn’t support playlists so if you want to have multiple songs playing without having people to select them manually you could make a compilation out of multiple songs resulting in a single track.
To do that use Audacity, GarageBand, iMovie ’06 or any other application which can be used for that.
Chapter 3: How to insert a Flashplayer into a page
Insert the code you got in Chapter 2 in the page where you would like to add the player to. Once you added the code to RapidWeaver select it all and go to “< >” (Apply HTML markup) and choose “Code”.
If you want to have a popup window go on reading Chapter 4.
Chapter 4: How to have people listening to the music no matter what page they’re on
1. To me the best way to achieve that is by making a Popup window. When a visitor clicks on a link or an image a popup window opens which contains the player. The visitor then keeps the popup window behind the main window while browsing your site. This way no matter what page he’s visiting the visitor can listen to your music without any interruptions.
2. Copy and paste the following code to the page where you want the "Click here to listen to music" link which will open the popup window to appear
<div align="center">
<A HREF="#" onClick="window.open('page.html','_blank','toolbar=0, location=0, directories=0, status=0, scrollbars=0, resizable=0, copyhistory=0, menuBar=0, width=300, height=200');return(false)">TextToDisplay</A>
</div>
3. Where it says page.html put the url of the page you want to point it to, the page containing the Music player.
if you're publishing to MobileMe the url of the page created in Step 1 is:
http://web.me.com/username/nameofthepagecreatedinstep1.html
if publishing to folder:
http://yourbaseurl.com/nameofthefilecreatedinstep1.html
Where it says width and height you can decide how big the popup window has to be (should be about as big as the player, read width and height in the player code)
Where it says TextToDisplay put Click here to listen to music. Or whatever you like to be displayed.
If you want to have an image displaying instead of the text for the links simply replace the text with:
urloftheimage: Put all the images you want to use for menus in a folder on your desktop. Upload the folder containing your images to your server (example: create a Folder named MenuImages.
- For MobileMe go to the Finder menu and select Go/iDisk/My iDisk/ or hit Schift+Command(Apple)+i and then go to /Web/Sites/. Drop your MenuImages folder into the Sites folder.
Entering: http://web.me.com/username/MenuImages/filename.jpg in your browser should bring up this file.
- If you're publishing to folder put it in the main location on your server using an ftp program
Entering: http://yourbaseurl.com/MenuImages/filename.jpg in your browser should bring up this file.
4. Once you added the code to RapidWeaver select it all and go to “< >” (Apply HTML markup) and choose “Code”. When changing to Preview mode you will see the link or an image appearing.
That's how my code looks after I changed the four things to change (page.html, width, height, TextToDisplay)
<div align="center">
<SPAN STYLE="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: 12pt">
<A HREF="#" onClick="window.open('http://alaskadream.org/music/Music.html','_blank','toolbar=0, location=0, directories=0, status=0, scrollbars=0, resizable=0, copyhistory=0, menuBar=0, width=295, height=600');return(false)">Click Here</A>
</div>
Note: With the previously described method people will have to click to open the player and music start playing. There's a code that actually opens the popup window automatically when someone is visiting a page. The problem is: Most browsers will block it due to security reasons. Most people have “Block auto-popup windows” enabled in their browsers. The window will not popup for them. They just get notified that the browser blocked a popup and can then chose to allow it. And if you put the code to every single page I guess a window will pop up on every single page a user looks at. Bottom line: it’s not recommended, thus I will not provide it here.
Chapter 5: Using QuickTime player instead of a flash player (which I wouldn't recommend)
First let me say that you can't have a playlist using quicktime
Second let me say that there are a lot of PC users who don't have Quicktime plugin installed on their machines so they will not be able to play the music. That’s why I wouldn’t recommend to use it.
The only thing that changes if you want to use Quicktime Player is that you have to drag&drop your mp3 file to the page instead of inserting the html code of the Flash Player.
Nevertheless you may want to think about adding your music in a Flash Player just to protect a bit better your files from downloading if you don't want people to download them. It's very easy to download music even from a Flash Player too but less than from a quicktime player because you have to know the 'how to' (which I'm not gonna tell you here!).
Chapter 6: Note about iTunes music
Buying music on iTunes doesn’t give you the right to share it. If you buy a DRM free song on iTunes your e-mail address (thus your account information) gets registered in the file. If you share with your friends whom share it with other whom share it with others again your account information could be found all over the world and the music labels might notice that there are a lot of copies of the song with your account information and you could get a phone call by a lawyer which (obviously) wouldn’t be nice. For more information read the following article.
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