External Variables Are Back

Posted on October 28, 2006
Categories: Flash, XSPF.

…And this time, no bugs! You are now able to use external variables in a text file with your players, to replace the long strings of variables in you html. One file can be used with however many players you need. Just replace the paragraph or two of ‘www.mydomain.com/xspf_player.swf?playlist_url=playlist.xml&alphabetiz e=true&autoplay=1′ etc. with ‘www.mydomain.com/xspf_player.swf?loadurl=variables.txt’, Using ‘loadurl’ as your sole variable. This finishes my planned work for the XSPF, but I still have a lot to do. I’m deciding on whether to build a skin formatter, for users to create their own layouts, or new downloadable versions with different looks, or both. See it here.

The playlist creator is now open-source and up for download. For those looking into the scripting side of flash, this is a good example of flash forms and text manipulation.

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11 comments.

Kat
Comment on October 28th, 2006.

Please please build a skin formatter and/or downloadable versions - I love your player, but I wish I could change more than just the text color. I’d love to have the whole thing black, with white text, instead of the grey with dark grey. Fabricio’s version offers tons of skins to download and I’d love to see them for your version.

Thanks
Kat

Comment on October 28th, 2006.

Skinning it isn’t too hard.

All you really need it Flash 8. Just edit the color of all the stuff in the layers. It helps if you lock all layers and just work one at a time. I kinda made an attempt at it on my MySpace.
Doesn’t look too bad.

Mike

Comment on October 28th, 2006.

Well, any flash version costs at over $300 usually. I do not condone piracy here. and if some are not experienced with the program, it can be difficult. My idea comes from the Wimpy Player. Is you take a peek at the skin files, they are just XML files with the locations, images, colors, functions, etc. of the buttons. All of that is loaded and inserted on the fly at runtime. This would give any person with a text editor the ability to customize their player to their liking.

Brian
Comment on October 28th, 2006.

If you could can you make it so that the progression bar for both playback and loading stand out a bit more?

Comment on October 29th, 2006.

Hi, i am using your Xspf player and i´d like to congratulate you for your work!
My website looks better with the player and people can listen to the music. Thanks again,
Mastertoaster

Comment on October 30th, 2006.

I love your version of this player… the fact that it plays videos is simply great. I didn’t really care for the fact that the videos were so small and square though, so I made my own modifications ;) [see here].

A skin formatter would be really neat.

Comment on October 30th, 2006.

Most excellent news on the working external variables! You said it was coming and here it is. Thank you.

I also support the idea of skinning. I would be ridiculously happy with this player if skinning were available (even more so than I already am). Plus, it’d make your player undeniably the best xspf player out there.

Keep up the amazing work!

Comment on November 4th, 2006.

I was pleasantly surprised today to find the updates you’ve made to the XSPF player. One thing that I would like is more documentation of the different variables you’ve implemented. The documentation page mentions a lot of additions to the original code but no explanation of how to use them! Example: the Amazon API: am I missing where the info is on how to use this? That’s a great addition, but it would be great to know how to use it!

Comment on November 4th, 2006.

The Amazon Image API is implemented automatically in the case that there is no image specified, and the main_image is left blank. It searches Amazon for the best image match to your artist.

Comment on November 6th, 2006.

I was just wondering if it were possible to include some sort of history of plays, a way to keep track of what songs are being played the most? If so, a feature like that would be mighty valuable.

Comment on December 11th, 2006.

Thank you so much for creating the creator. Embeding the player was confusing with the Euloa guidelines, but with the creator and everything, worked out. THANK YOU SO MUCH. THANk you for all your hard work.

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