Yahoo! Media Player release

Posted by Lucas Gonze, February 8, 2008 at 7:44 pm, in Player, YMusicBlog General, Yahoo! Music Unlimited. 7 Comments

There are some fairly significant and exciting changes in the new build of Yahoo! Media Player.

Prettying up

The changes that users will notice the most have to do with visible behaviors.

Smaller footprint

The player is now minimized when first loaded rather than half-open. This prevents it from taking up space in the page when it is not needed.

Our goal is to empower the page, not overpower it. A smaller footprint helps the media and text mesh seamlessly.

Steady scrolling

The player doesn’t flicker while you’re scrolling anymore. Previously, if you were using any browser besides IE7, scrolling the page would cause the player to fade out and fade back in when you stopped scrolling. Now the player hovers in place while you scroll without fading in and out.

Search doesn’t interrupt

The player contains a link to search on text related to the current track. This link used to open in the current window, which would interrupt playback. Interrupting playback was a bad surprise for many people. This link now opens in a new window.

New home

There is a brand spanking new home page.

This page isn’t intended to have any dynamic features. It’s purpose is to draw new people into understanding the important points and to give them a smooth experience when trying out the player for the first time.

Play this page

You can now use almost any document on the web as a playlist by
linking to that document and adding class="playthispage" to the link. We scrape the document to find media links and pull those links back into the current page. There will be a play button next to the class=”playthispage” link, and the remote media links will be added to the current playlist.
“Play this page” can handle many different document types. It can find enclosures in an RSS or Atom feed. It can read all common internet playlist formats, including XSPF, ASX, M3U, and PLS. It can read HTML, so you can use one web page as the playlist for another.

Example link:
<a href="http://www.example.com/" class="playthispage">
play example.com
</a>.

Things you can do with this feature:

• A podcaster can use their feed as a playlist for their web page without needing to create an additional playlist.
• A musician’s web site can have a single master page for all of their music and use it as the playlist for any other page in the site.
• A developer could mash up audio sites with other sites. For example, you could put a Wikipedia entry about a composer together with Archive.org recordings related to that composer.
• An XSPF playlist with artist, album, title and other metadata could be imported into HTML, which lacks music metadata fields.
• A playlist creator could make their playlist accessible in third party web pages which ordinarily would be hampered by cross-site scripting restrictions.

We implemented this feature using a web service that we host. That’s interesting in that it shows the benefit of our unusual architecture. Browser-based media players have traditionally been pure Flash. Our player will use anything it can get its hands on at run-time, including JavaScript, CSS, semantic HTML, web services, and, yes, Flash, and having access to our own web services made it possible to do this feature.

Cross-domain XSPF

We now have the ability to load XSPF playlists from any public source on the web. Previously we were bound by the Javascript same-origin security policy, which is even more restrictive than the Flash crossdomain.xml approach. Now we aren’t bound by either.

Bug fixes

The green disc in the minimized mode of the player was pulsing even when no audio is playing. The pulsing green disc is meant to let you know when the minimized player is playing audio. It now does that.

Safari was posting some JavaScript errors on page load. These errors shouldn’t show up anymore.

We fixed some display issues with error icons in Firefox when the player encountered a bad mp3 link. (But error messages are still in a messy state overall).

Fixed a bug where the play button was not playing the right song. You could reproduce this bug by clicking a play button on the page, then clicking pause, then clicking a play button for a different song on the page. Rather than playing that different song, the player would restart the song that was paused.

Browser cache time for the player JavaScript files is now one day.

Who

The core team for this rev: Amit, Clint, Dave W, Douglas, Lino, Mike D, Suman, and William Khoe. Thanks to Mike D and Dave W for much of the text of this post, and kudos to wwhite for the scraper web service.

Yahoo! Music, Rhapsody, and FoxyTunes

Posted by iancr, February 4, 2008 at 2:37 pm, in YMusicBlog General, Yahoo! Music Unlimited. 27 Comments

Last year, shortly after I assumed the role of Yahoo! Music’s General Manager, we started saying publicly that we were “de-emphasizing” our premium music offering, Yahoo! Music Unlimited. The fact of the matter is that building a great premium music service takes a huge amount of resources and effort, and it was taking energy away from our important main offerings, music.yahoo.com (the Web’s #1 Music destination), music videos, and LAUNCHcast Radio. Around 25 million people visit Yahoo! Music each month. Relatively speaking, a small percentage of those use Yahoo! Music Unlimited, yet an large portion of our resources were being poured into this service. It was clear to us that we needed to make a major strategic shift.

It wasn’t an easy decision. We’re huge fans of Yahoo! Music Unlimited and those customers include many of our most loyal and valuable. We wanted to be sure those users had the best on-demand music experience available on the Internet.

As a result, we’re pleased to announce Rhapsody as our exclusive partner for on-demand music. Yahoo! Music Unlimited subscribers will have a chance to easily take their music catalogs and migrate to Rhapsody. Later this year we will be integrating Rhapsody into music.yahoo.com, so you can continue to use Yahoo! Music for music discovery, news, videos, lyrics, radio, concerts, blogs, and more, and always be a click away from music on-demand. Also, our subscribers will finally have access to the best off-PC experiences such as Rhapsody for TiVo, Sonos, and Control 4 in the living room.

We hope being able to take your Yahoo! Music Unlimited collection to the best subscription service on the Web — the one which works on PC or Mac, Firefox or Safari as well as TiVo, Sonos, etc. — at the Yahoo! Music Unlimited price, is an acceptable outcome. We sincerely apologize for any hassle and thank you for joining us in the Yahoo! Music Unlimited run. It was a wild ride for all of us.

I’m sure a question many people are going to ask is if this means Yahoo! is backing away from online music. Au contraire. It is a major strategy shift but we’re still investing in our music business as evidenced by my second bit of news: our acquisition of FoxyTunes. FoxyTunes is the world’s most popular media toolbar, a plug-in for either Firefox or Internet Explorer. FoxyTunes adds useful functionality to more than 30 media players, including iTunes, Winamp, and Pandora. With FoxyTunes you can easily control your media player from the place you spend most of your time, your Web browser, and jump from a track playing in any media player to lyrics, biography, videos, or more music in a single click. What’s more, the innovative “Signatunes” feature helps you express yourself via your music tastes by automatically inserting signatures into your favorite email program (Yahoo! Mail, Gmail), social network messages (Facebook, MySpace), or blog authoring/commenting platform, based on the currently playing track.

For an excellent tour of FoxyTunes’ far-reaching functionality, please see the screencast on FoxyTunes.com.

While it doesn’t tell the whole story, this news, along with the recent news of our Web Media Player (for a great example of the player in use, check out Aurgasm.us), points the direction for a new Yahoo! Music. We’re focusing on delivering relevant music experiences on the Web and are happy to be partnering with Rhapsody to bring you a simple, integrated, on-demand music experience.

If you’ve never used Rhapsody, check out my best of 2007 playlist on Rhapsody now for free. And be sure to control Rhapsody.com and learn more about each artist with FoxyTunes.

Enjoy,
ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music

The Yahoo! Music Web Player

Posted by iancr, February 3, 2008 at 9:00 pm, in Player, YMusicBlog General, Yahoo! Music Unlimited. 14 Comments

When Lucas Gonze first started at Yahoo! more than two years ago, the first thing he told me was that we needed a microformat for playlisting. Since we’d just finished creating and implementing XSPF I was allergic to the idea of another format, this one in HTML instead of XML. But Lucas was right and (thankfully) persistent. He finally convinced me by pointing out the fact I was in denial of: “No 14 year-old MySpace kid is going to create an XML file, upload it to a 3rd party host, make sure the mime type is set correctly, etc. It has to be as easy as writing HTML to add media to Web pages, and shouldn’t involve proprietary technologies like Flash.”

We started playing with the idea and prototyping how this might work. Lucas created hTrack, the microformat. We learned a lot and decided what we wanted to build and how we wanted to roll it out.

A few weeks back we released step zero, our first road-tested version of our Web-based Media Player. The idea is insanely simple:

1) Add this single line of javascript to your page:
<script src=”http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com/js”></script>
2) Add a link to any MP3 to your page, like so:
<a href=”http://209.133.33.135/~icr/BeastieBoys/Denver_Intro_TimeForLiving.mp3″>Mix Master Mike’s Tom Sawyer show opener and Time For Livin, from Denver</a>

and BOOM, you have a media player. Of course there’s a lot more you can do with it if you’d like. For more advanced uses see the public wiki or join the mailing list and converse with some of the creative and talented hackers there (we also hang out in #heavy on irc.landoleet.org if you want to drop by).

Again, playing MP3s is just the beginning. Note that the version on Music.Yahoo.com supports our subscription service. The next version will support Ogg, WMA, and any codec you have installed. Of course we’ve got a plan for video (it’s not called the Yahoo! Audio Player).

The idea is to make media a first-class object on Web pages and and abstracted away from proprietary technologies. The video tag in HTML 5 is headed the right direction, but the hAudio microformat (which we tentatively plan to support) will get us there even faster.

We’ve been very happy with the response. c|net and others included the player in their blog posts about the player, but more importantly MP3 bloggers are adopting it and smart folks are finding other clever uses for it.

Hope you dig it. If not, let us know why so we can improve it. If you do use it, be sure to add a link to your site on the Wiki so we can check it out.

To see it in action, here are a few Beastie Boys songs I recorded from the sound board back in 1998:

Mix Master Mike’s Tom Sawyer show opener and Time For Livin, from Denver. Check the crowd noise when The Biz starts singing. Crazy.
Slow and Low, live in Kansas City
Ricky’s Theme, also from Denver
Flute Loop, recorded live in Chicago

Enjoy,
ian c rogers
Yahoo! Music