Posted by cwdjrxyz on 04/16/06 08:08

Darrell wrote:
> I have a musician client who insists on having a Flash player which
> starts playing a song when the site is loaded. (I realize that the user
> should have a say in the matter, and if I didn't need the money I'd
> insist on it.)
>
> Worse, she wants the player to play the song *continuously*, even when
> other pages in the site are visited (as opposed to the song starting
> over on every click). The only way I can think to accomplish this is to
> place the player in a frame, and I hate frames almost as much as I hate
> unrequested audio. This may simply be because I don't know that much
> about frames and have no desire to dig into them, if it's not necessary.
>
> I simply don't have much experience with media players and would love
> some advice on whether this is possible without (or even with!) frames.
> As mentioned I already realize it's undesirable.

I know that people have made slide shows using frames for the images
and music that keeps playing as slides change. Most likely you could
use much the same code to change pages rather than just images.
Unfortunately, I do not have a url for you at the moment but a search
using slideshow and music might turn up something that you can adapt.

This sort of thing is what the media presentation xml language SMIL is
designed for. You can run music, images, web pages, video etc as
exactly timed events in parallel and/or series. Unfortunately most
browser will not see SMIL. However the recent Real players have SMIL
built into them, but I doubt if you client would want a page which
would work only when Real is installed or some other SMIL player or
obscure browser is used.

I have used a rather complicated dhtml slide show in which all of the
images are on the page at once and are turned on and off using
visibility. Javascript of course is required. It is not difficult to
also include music that continues as images are turned on and off. Most
likely web pages could be used instead of images, but I do not have
time to check this out just now. This code is a few years old and might
need updating in addition to revisions to display pages instead of
images, if that proved reasonable.

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