The Shearspire MP3 Player

head shot Dr. Steven Estrella of Shearspire, Inc. has created the Shearspire MP3 Player as a memberware product. You can try it out for free on your local hard drive, but to use the Shearspire MP3 Player on your Web site you must be a member of MakePages.com. There you can learn all about Web development techniques and how to use audio on the Web.

You can use the Shearspire MP3 Player to load an MP3 file on any page of your Web site. The Shearspire MP3 Player lets you control the volume and view the time remaining on your audio file. The neat thing is that this player requires no programming. All you have to do is name your files correctly and you are all set (see instructions below). Just make sure you are legally entitled to load your desired MP3 file on your site. Independent musicians and bands can use this application to publicize their music. Teachers can use it to make audio lectures available for students to download.

Above is a sample MP3 file embedded on this page using the Shearspire MP3 Player. In this case, I have embedded the mp3player.swf file which loads quickly because it contains no audio. Once you click the play button, however, the mp3player.mp3 file loads for you to play. This file contains a Scott Joplin excerpt.

Instructions

This simple Flash application will work on any Web site with any MP3 file. Just follow these simple instructions.

  1. Within the folder containing this file, place any MP3 file.
  2. Rename the MP3 file so that it doesn't have any spaces or funny characters in the file name. Also, make sure the file name ends in .mp3. Let's suppose you called the file mytune.mp3.
  3. Duplicate the mp3player.swf and rename the new file to match the name of your MP3 file. In this case, call it mytune.swf.
  4. Upload both mytune.swf and mytune.mp3 to the same folder in your Web site.
  5. Use Dreamweaver, GoLive, or any good Web development program to embed mytune.swf in any of your Web pages. Caution: Be sure that the mp3 file and the swf file are in the same folder as the html file. Otherwise, the swf file will not be able to locate the mp3 file.

Thank you for supporting MakePages.com. I hope you enjoy using the Shearspire MP3 Player on your Web site.