The Yahoo! Music Web Player

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

Yahoo! Media Player on Aurgasm

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

14 Comments »

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  1. Clicking one of those mp3 links just starts printing the MP3 as text in Opera 9.25. Even if it’s not going to work in Opera, you should set the MIME type right so that browsers download the MP3s rather than handling them as text.

    Comment by landtuna — February 4, 2008 #

  2. Hi Landtuna,

    That’s actually probably a problem with the web server where the MP3 is hosted, not the player. Thanks for the heads up on that one.

    ian

    Comment by iancr — February 4, 2008 #

  3. In other news, Yahoo music unlimited is dead and the Sansa connect is no longer a connect.

    Comment by FredFredrickson — February 4, 2008 #

  4. Heya Ian, I’ve been following your player’s release closely – congrats and looks like a great move.

    I totally agree with the realization that kiddies aren’t going to drop XSPF XML in to their pages. It provides a solid, easily controllable, visual layout as well – cake, and score on the KISS approach.

    Question: What about Dave Winer’s OPML? That kind of a list system is simple and becoming the defacto way of transporting RSS feeds (and a lot of other lists, including playlists). We’ve been looking at it for audiobook playlists and table-of-contents at iofy with success.

    I’m not arguing it to be a best, or even good, pick, but am curious if it was on the radar during the playlist planning.

    Nice, keep it up!
    Sol

    Comment by sol — February 4, 2008 #

  5. Ian,

    Kudos on moving towards microformats. This player is a great first step; I’m looking forward to seeing how it evolves (hope a progress bar with FF/RWD capability is somewhere on the feature list!).

    Andrei

    Comment by malaparte — February 5, 2008 #

  6. [...] Skyverado13 wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptNote 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). … [...]

    Pingback by The Yahoo! Music Web Player-Download Music Free — March 19, 2008 #

  7. Hi,
    I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
    Regards,
    Jane

    Comment by Webhost — July 30, 2009 #

  8. A Y!Music Web PLayer… sounds interesting. Good luck,,

    Comment by AudioBookListener — August 4, 2009 #

  9. [...] 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 [...]

    Pingback by BULTAGON » Yahoo! Music, Rhapsody, and FoxyTunes — October 1, 2009 #

  10. thank U

    Comment by منتديات — December 28, 2009 #

  11. Hi,
    I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
    Regards,
    Mike

    Comment by Free Wii Points — February 9, 2010 #

  12. Comment by pz10 — July 7, 2010 #


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    Comment by pz10 — July 7, 2010 #

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    Comment by ghd — July 30, 2010 #

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