How do I build a simple MP3 player in Flash?

Question

I have recently redesigned my website and need to make
several mp3 files available for playback. I'm a voiceover talent,
and I need to have my demos readily available to those who visit my
website to hear my work.
I built the site using Dreamweaver (there's a little bit of
Flash content there, but the site itself is not a Flash site). I
know just anough about using Flash to be dangerous. :-) At the
present time, I just embedded my 11 demos on a page, with each demo
appearing TWICE -- once with the Windows Media Player embedded and
once with the Quick Time player embedded -- to allow for maximum
compatibility. But with 22 media players embedded in the page,
well, you can pretty much guess what happens -- the page takes a
freakin' eternity to load. No one's going to wait that long.
In a previous version of my website, I had deployed a
third-party app called Wimpy Button to achieve this functionality
(www.wimpyplayer.com). Wimpy button is a very simple little Flash
app that is designed to achieve precisely the functionality I need.
But now when I launch the Wimpy Button Maker (the first step to
creating the player), I get an error message that I think is
telling me that either a .dll file required by the program is not
there on my computer OR that a program I have since installed on my
computer is either using or has overwritten that .dll file. Either
way, the Wimpy solution is not working for me. So naturally, since
Wimpy was doing all this in Flash, I figured the most logical place
to turn was to Flash itself. I'm hoping to create my own little
playback interface that I can place in multiple instances on the
webpage, with each one set to trigger playback of a different .mp3
file.
Here's an example of something similar to what I'd like to
end up with. Visit
http://randybrown.voice123.com.
There, you'll see a series of players down the right-hand side of
the page, and each one triggers playback of a different .mp3 file.
A closer look at the .swf file can be seen at
http://voice123.com/swf/small_player.swf
, so, as you can see, the graphic itself ain't that complicated. I
know I can build the graphics file (or something similar) without
too much difficulty.
But getting it to have the functionality I need to deploy for
this purpose is where I'm lost. I just don't have enough experience
with Flash to have much of a clue.
Can anyone walk me through the steps involved?
Your thoughtful answer would be MUCH appreciated.
Randy

Answer 1

The best MP3 player I ever found for flash uses xspf
playlists and xml - really cool and easy to use/implement. Check it
at
http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net/
This player will go through a playlist you determine, or can jump
from track to track. It takes a little bit of testing to set up,
but is much simpler than writing your own player - and it's free.