We’ve all seen it, on MySpace and musicians’ pages – gaudy media players with visualizations, fake equalization bars,  neon playlists, and in general flash & crash burdened pages.  Blah, just what you want to do with your visit, wait and wait and wait for the player to compile in your browser, much less the music to start streaming.

For years I have put music on my sites by simply creating a .m3u text file, which pointed to the urls of the .mp3 files I wanted to stream for the visitor, and just let people load the .m3u file into their Windows media player, or Mac or Linux equivalent.

Well, not too long ago, I was asked to do a web site for a very classy classical musician, and I just wanted something better. I wanted something built into his page that would call attention to the music, and not to the media player that was playing it. I did a lot of searching and experimenting.  It actually took me 3 days to find it, and you know where I did? Right in plain sight at Yahoo.com.

Really, I’m not a paying customer of Yahoo’s (nor do I work for them), although I do use their free email service once in a while.  But this is something really nice they offer for free, and when I can get something OpenSource or free, I certainly avail myself of it.  The only risk of taking something for free that isn’t also open source is if the company that offered it ever goes out of business, the player might stop working.  Depends who they sell to.  Depends if they release it on the open source wilds (like Netscape to Mozilla to Firefox).

All you have to do is go to mediaplayer.yahoo.com, copy the single line of script code they offer into the header of the page in question, create links to your .mp3 files, and the Yahoo! media player will automatically give you tiny little play buttons next to each .mp3 link and assemble the playlist for you.  It just recedes into the background until you need it, and then just a ghost player appears across the bottom of the page.

example.mp3

This was just something done right.