My Class Song is set into my Home Page and invisible so that classmates can automatically hear that song. The problem is after about 6 times of continuous play of the Notre Dame fight song

I am attaching file with my Playlist code, does anyone know how to modify so that the song will be played ONCE, then stop. If they want to hear it again, they could simply exit Home Page and restart Home Page.

I'm not sure about Playlist repeating but there may be instructions for this somewhere on their site. You can always upload an MP3 and embed it seamlessly on the page and set it to only play once. I can assist you in doing that if you upload an mp3 of the song to your File Vault. Maybe somebody else here is familiar with creating a Playlist that doesn't auto repeat.

Hi Brad,

That makes a whole lot more sense to Upload to Vault rather than a Playlist, when all I want is one single song. I did as your requested, and as I understand, the following:
1. Edit Home Page
2. Clicked Chain Link
3. Clicked File Vault, browsed and Uploaded
4. I did not Insert yet as I don't want it visible on Home Page.

Can you help me to enable that single song in my File Vault to play automatically when classmate accesses the Home Page, play once, and stop?

I appreciate any help, as the song playing over and over is a distraction. BTW, I went ahead and fully deleted the Playlist while you check on this for me. I won't need the Playlist there if this works anyway.

Hi Brad,

Your efforts were working just fine a couple of times, while there were 3 classmates on my site. Now it won't play at all when going to Home Page.

Are you working on it still perhaps? Let me know when you are all done, and maybe a little summary of how to do this. That would help me not to bother you on future endeavors, hopefully.

Well that's interesting, the latest Firefox browser blocks MP3 files from being natively embedded on the page. Probably some type of security feature to protect against malicious mp3 files. Oh well, so much for doing it like I've done it for the past 10 years.

So, I came up with a little workaround and grabbed a free Flash MP3 player, put in the path to your MP3 in your File Vault, stuck it at the end of your last Announcement and then hid it from view. Will just play once now. Works great. View your last Announcement in source view to see how it works. If you want to do the same thing in the future, just grab a copy of that exact embed code and paste it somewhere else. And just change the name of the mp3 file of course.

Thank you very, very much Brad. I really like your software, and intend to tell others.

Derrell & Brad,

I can tell you it works perfect in fussy Safari 4 also--except it counts the number of errors on the page and something I've never seen before is about every 10 seconds the error count increments by two. It was up to 32 when I went to Post this message. At least the music played only once.

Hi Brad,

The website loads as normal, but at the Home Page apparently the player is very slow to load. I thought it had quit working again, but it finally kicked in. My computer is pretty fast Windows 7, so I don't think it was because of my PC. However, it earlier decided to download a new version of Java. Is this Java ran? Seems pretty slow to get the play.

Brad
The website still loads as normal, but at the Home Page the player is very slow to load. I thought it had quit working again, but it finally kicked in. My computer is pretty fast Windows 7, so I don't think it was because of my PC. It takes so long to load the player, that many classmates will have already read over the Home Page and moved away to other pages.

Would it be faster if put into the Content of the basic Home Page instead of the second announcement? The code used runs up against the Announcement, so I am not completely certain where one leaves off and the other begins.

Hi Brad,

Strange, but it almost seems the MP3 will play BEFORE officially logging in. If sit in login state, it will start playing in 30 seconds. As soon as login, can't play it any longer????

Very strange???

Derrell Pulis wrote:

The load time will depend on your web browser, your connection speed, and more than anything else the amount of compression applied to the mp3. In your case you don't have a very long clip and it's still half a megabyte anyway. So that more than anything else is accounting for the load time. For me it takes about 5 seconds, and I'm currently in a car on a Sprint phone connection. So it definitely various. If you want the file to load faster you'd need to do one of the following:'

1) Go back to Playlist version and figure out how to turn off auto repeat (I'm assuming Playlist uses a more highly compressed version of the song)

2) Find an mp3 of the song that is more highly compressed so it loads in faster.

Derrell Pulis wrote:

Not strange at all. The song is set to only play once. So after that the whole page is cached. If you log in the song is still not likely to start playing again in most browsers. You'd need to press the refresh button on your browser to reload the page to make it play again.

Oh by the way I don't see any errors in Safari at all. You possibly loaded the page while I was working with it earlier. Looks fine to me.

Brad,

I think I see what my issue is. First, I NEVER have any website "remember my name". I always manually enter ID and password, or use Roboform to enter automatically for me.

Both are too slow to get into my website before the player starts. I guess I reverse my earlier question, can MP3 player be delayed a 6-10 seconds longer before starting.

The reason is, I would suspect many of my classmates enter ID/Password manually and they would have the same problem. If I do have the system to Remember Me, works every time, since faster I guess.

I'd just cut and paste the player code into a new blank announcement, and set that announcement to logged in members only. That way it will begin playing only after Classmates log in.

That seems to work Brad. Thanks!!!

Brad,

Would you be willing to share the details of this technique? How do you hide part of an announcement.

Thanks.

Brad Switzer wrote:

Brad, just for your information, during this solution I had typed a forum request to www.playlist.com. They responded that they DO NOT support play once, nor have an option for that. That is too bad, actually.

Hmmm. Interesting. Thanks for letting me know.

Brad, have you had any experiences with www.mixpod.com? Haven't tried it, but noticed they have URL builders preferences to set for Autoplay, Shuffle, LOOP, and Privacy.

Whether that works or not, is a question that would have to be tested. And of course can it be "hidden" by changes to height and width?

Dick Bell wrote:

It's not really hiding part of an Announcement. All Announcements can be set to be seen by only logged in members if you wish. So if you put your music in an Announcement set to be seen by only logged in members, then it will only play after the member actually logs into the site.

Derrell Pulis wrote:

Never tried it. But if you do, let me know if it works for you or not.

Well, below is the code generated for Mixpod, unmodified. It will play fine as it is, and there is only 2 sets of width/height needed for making invisible. Even though I built with options of Auto Yes, and Loop No, it still repeats songs. Finally, there is no Pop-Out Player like Playlists.com has which is very handy. But it will play nicely.

border=0 width=0 height=0
src="http://counters.gigya.com/wildfire/IMP/CXNID=2000002.0N
XC/bT*xJmx*PTEyNzExMTQyNzU4NTUmcHQ9MTI3MTExNDI4MDA*NCZwPTE4M
DMxJmQ9Jmc9MSZvPTVjOGJhN2RhNDg4NDRhZThiZTQ3/ZTE2MDRjYTVhNTJm
.gif" />

Hmmm. Interesting. Maybe you can ask them why it's still looping even though you've set it not to?

Okay, I will email them and let you know when they respond.

Brad Switzer wrote:

That works fine, I am occasionally seeing when log in that the song does not play. However, experimentation with that showed that if you log 'back' on too soon after a previous session, it fails to play. What I did realize, if I actually hit the "Log Out" link, then log back in fairly soon, all works fine. Appears if you just close the browser and not click 'Log Out', you are not truly released from 'signed in' real quickly.

It's your cache. The song is set to only play once. So if you go to your page right away again in the same browser session, in most browsers the song is not going to play again. Clear your cache and then go to your site, you'll see it works every single time. This is what all new users will be seeing when they first come to your site.

Brad Switzer wrote:

Hi Brad,
I continued to have problems with the class song not always starting, probably due to cache but I cleaned that several tims.

I found an alternative to www.playlist.com, since they DO NOT have an option to Not Loop the songs. I went to www.mixpod.com, and they have that option (but it doesn't work right now, and they are investigating). Also, they have some customizable player displays. I have attached what I put on an Announcement to play only for logged on classmates and it is working great! It has an advantage of being a very small player.

Anyone wants to see the player, click the Mixpod.jpg link at the top of this posting.