ITauthor

One of these days browsers will be able to play audio files natively. You'll just be able to write an audio element in the HTML, point it at either an audio file, or a list of audio files, or an RSS feed containing audio files, and it'll display a smart looking audio player in the Web page.

This got a little bit nearer with HTML5, but Firefox 3.6 doesn't support MP3 files (which most people still use for audio files on the Web), just Ogg Vorbis. IE9, on the other hand, supports MP3 but not Ogg.

There is a jQuery plugin called jPlayer which goes part of the way to providing a cross-browser solution, but it's a very techie solution and not easy to configure.

So, until all of this gets sorted out finally, most of us just follow the path of least resistance and use a Flash-based audio player and accept that, because Steve Jobs is on a crusade to kill off Flash, no one browsing your pages on an iPhone or an iPad is going to see the player.

As I write this, in June 2010, the podcast pages I produce to accompany my podcasts use a Flash player that comes as part of the Blubrry PowerPress plugin for WordPress. And at the top of the sidebar on each page I use the Easylistener player. Here's a screenshot, just to remember it by, as it's only a matter of time before I have to remove it:

I periodically scour the internet for small, nice-looking audio players that can be pointed at an RSS feed, and Easylistener is the only one I've found that I really like.

William White describes the origins of Easylistener:

Easylistener was developed in the Yahoo! Media Innovation Group by William White and Joseph Magnani. It was inspired by the work of Fabricio Zuardi, Lucas Gonze and many other amazing and talented engineers working for Yahoo! Music in San Diego and Santa Monica, who were developing the Yahoo! Media Player.

Easylistener feeds off XSPF, a venerable XML format for playlists. The little chunk of code that places the player on your Web page includes a reference to a Web site that will take the URL of a Web page and will go and read that page, extract details of any audio files it finds and build them into XSPF that it then feeds back to the Easylistener Flash application.

The trouble is all of this was developed by Yahoo! and they provided the "playthispage" service that produced the XSPF for the player. But Yahoo! lost interest in (or never really noticed) Easylistener, so it was left to rot. Back in July of last year I blogged that the URL for the "playthispage" service no longer worked, which resulted in no content appearing in the player. After a while they seemed to have moved it to another server and I got the player working again. However, it recently stopped again, and this time I was sure it was dead for good.

I emailed William White, who had commented on my original blog post, and I asked if he could help. He got back to me to say he'd set up a PHP script that provided the same XSPF generation service. As a result, for the time being, the player is working again.

To get it working again I added:

playthispage_url =http://musiclibre.org/playthispage/?url=

So my embed element now looks like this (note: the flashVars value should be one long string, I've broken it into lines here just for good looks):

<p style="margin-left:-10px; margin-top:0">     
    <embed src='http://l.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mig/playlistbadge/25.swf?referer='   
       width='170'     
       height='200'     
       wmode='transparent'     
       flashVars='playlist_url=http://www.itauthor.com/category/podcasts/feed&   
          playthispage_url=http://musiclibre.org/playthispage/?url=&   
          rounded_corner=1&skin_color_1=0,-100,-29,18&skin_color_2=0,-100,-27,20'   
       type='application/x-shockwave-flash'     
       pluginspage='http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer'     
   />                                                                              
</p>  

However, if you  want to use Easylistener to your own Web pages, the easy way to get it is to go to:
http://www.musiclibre.org/easylistener/

There's a nice little Web application there for setting the page that gets scraped for content and choosing the way you want the player to look. You then just copy the embed code and change "http://webjay.org/flash/xspf_player" to either "http://musiclibre.org/xspf_player" or "http://musiclibre.org/dark_player".

For example, here's one I just went and grabbed.

And if you don't see anything (or the player is empty), it means it's broken again.

Such a shame Yahoo! didn't continue supporting this because it's still way better than anything else out there that tries to do the same thing.

I've been on holiday for a couple of weeks: not doing anything much, just using up annual leave. One of the things I have done is fix up an audio recording setup in the little room that is now my home office. Here's how it looks:

The latest edition to my recording is a smart new microphone on an anglepoise arm:

It's a Rode Procaster and the main difference between it and other microphones I've used is that it's a dynamic microphone. Previously I've used condenser mics that need phantom power, but I've always had problems with hiss. The Procaster gives a great sound and wasn't break-the-bank expensive. I think it's very good value for money.

You can hear it in use on ITauthor Podcast #33.

      
The other bits of kit are things I've put together over a number of years:

M-Audio FastTrack Pro

This is really just a very nice external sound card. I need one of these because the sound card on my Dell Vostro is really, really, really awful. Even just for listening to audio normally it's bad: terrible hiss and interference from the spinning of the hard disk.

I have two of these so that I can route Windows sounds into Skype, so that the person on the other end can hear sound files I play.* This is a luxury: you don't need this. And if you're lucky enough to have a good sound card you don't need either of these (but I love these things anyway - you great great sound out of them).

*I just copied Joel Spolsky's Skype setup podcasting setup: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/PodcastEquipment.html
       

I bought this years ago and it's probably the bit I'd replace because it's not digital, so I lose a bit of sound quality by sending an analogue signal through this. But it's useful to have physical knobs to turn to get the levels right, and it allows me to do the Joel Spolsky method of Skype recording.
        

This is something else I've had for a few years now. It's a very simple little recorder but it does the job and is handy for recording away from home because it's small and very lightweight.
       

I wasted money on this. This is a great set of headphones: very comfortable to wear and a nice, warm, bassy sound, but I never managed to get good sound out of the microphone. As I mentioned above, this is a condenser mic and, through my setup, it always gave me hiss. It also has a thin, tinny, metalic sound that was really disappointing because this was an expensive headset.

I haven’t got round to doing a podcast for a while. I’ve been using up the remainder of my holidays recently, having lots of long weekends, which should have given me plenty of time to do one, but instead I’ve been doing … well, hang on a minute, what have I been doing?

I just recently discovered the Communications from DMN podcast. I particularly enjoyed the interview with Anne Gentle of JustWriteClick fame. Anne is a very engaging and enthusiastic speaker and I’d recommend giving this a listen:

http://dmn.podbean.com/2008/09/29/talking-shop-with-anne-gentle/

As a result of realising this podcast exists, I’ve now added it to my Technical Writers’ Podcast Mashup RSS feed:

  http://feeds2.feedburner.com/techwriterpodcasts

I was looking for an alternative to the SpringWidgets widget I used in a previous post, to put in the sidebar of this blog. The SpringWidgets one seems to need to load 100% before starting to play, which is no good because you've browsed to another page long before it's finished loading.

I came across EasyListener from Yahoo:
http://next.yahoo.net/archives/32/easylistener

It's a free RSS reader/MP3 player that is incredibly easy to configure. It also set me thinking that what would be good would be, rather than just listing my own podcasts in the player, to offer a mix of other tech writing podcasts, or podcasts that tech writers might find interesting.

I investigated a few options, but by far the easiest way to do this, and configure it just how you want it, is to use Yahoo Pipes. The first half of this video shows how you do it:

http://revver.com/video/1245467/yahoo-pipes-and-how-to-merge-filter-and-sort-multiple-rss-feeds/

Here's the configuration I came up with:
 

As I'm writing this the resulting feed combines four feeds:

• Tech Writer Voices
• Grammar Girl
• A Way With Words
• The ITauthor Podcast

Yahoo Pipes takes the 15 most recent posts (except any where the enclosure is video rather than audio) and generates the following feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/techwriterpodcasts

Note: The above feed actually comes from Feedburner, but it's got the same content as the one from Yahoo. I just dropped the Yahoo feed into Feedburner because Feedburner gives me a nicer URL and generates some nice stats about how many people download and subscribe to the feed.

When I put this feed URL into the EasyPlayer code generator, I get this:

A nice easy way to help promote other podcasts that you enjoy listening to and want to share with other people.

UPDATE:

OK, so you may have noticed that the embedded EasyPlayer widget doesn't work. It seems to be picky about which feeds it'll play with. It's fine with the RSS feed for ITauthor, but it doesn't like the output from Pipes - even though both EasyPlayer and Pipes are Yahoo creations and the feed I produced from Pipes is valid RSS (I checked).

So here's the same feed in the old, slow-loading, and uglier SpringWidgets player:

UPDATE 2:

My default browser is Firefox and, in Firefox, you can see a SpringWidgets audio player above. Internet Explorer, however, all I can see is a big white space. So my enthusiasm for audio player widgets has just taken a severe dip. I've messed around with both of these widgets for too much of my weekend, so I'm going to give up now. I'll maybe try again in a few months and see if I can find one that's less buggy.

:-(