The MP3 Is Officially Dead, According To Its Creators

[ken]

http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2 ... s-creators

What will this mean for Songfight? Can we finally submit high quality WAV files instead of mp3s?!?!?

[jb]

At least nobody is still using MP3s...

Man they should tell every podcaster about this too eh?

JB

[Lunkhead]

I know one music streaming service that's still using mp3 ...

Also, maybe we should focus on making high quality music before we worry about high quality audio?

[Chumpy]

You don't think this has anything to do with all the patents on mp3 running out in 2017 do ya?

[fluffy]

You don't think this has anything to do with all the patents on mp3 running out in 2017 do ya?

The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, a division of the state-funded German research institution that bankrolled the MP3's development in the late '80s, recently announced that its "licensing program for certain MP3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated."

Translation: yes.

[Lunkhead]

On a more serious note, it looks like support for the "HTML5" audio tag is pretty widespread now, even on mobile browsers. What would folks think of a slight revamp of the songfight.org homepage to use the audio tag to provide players for each song right on the homepage...? There would still be download links too, so, no functionality we be removed/lost. The added benefit would be that you could listen to the songs without navigating away from the homepage.

[fluffy]

Using something like jPlayer Jukebox would definitely be nice, yeah.

[Lunkhead]

Do we even need to get that fancy? I was thinking it might be more in the spirit of the songfight.org homepage's lo-fi/old-school esthetic to just splat the browser generated players on the page, no JS library involved. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[jast]

The browser-generated players take up quite a lot of space if you put a bunch of them in a list, though.

I just made a minimalist script to set up players for all MP3 links on the page, no dependencies and works in all browsers back to IE9:

Code: Select all

document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function() {
  if (typeof Audio !== 'function') return;
  var links = document.querySelectorAll('a[href$=".mp3"]');
  var active;
  var setupPlayer = function(link) {
    var btn = document.createElement('a');
    btn.innerHTML = "\u25ba";
    btn.style.cursor = 'pointer';
    btn.style.fontSize = '80%';
    btn.style.padding = '2px';
    btn.style.marginRight = '1ex';
    btn.style.border = 'solid 1px '+ btn.style.color;
    btn.style.borderRadius = '2px';
    btn.style.textDecoration = 'none';
    btn.addEventListener('click', function(e) {
      if (active) {
        active.button.style.display = 'inline';
        active.player.parentNode.removeChild(active.player);
        active = null;
      }
      btn.style.display = 'none';
      var player = document.createElement('audio');
      player.setAttribute('autoplay', '');
      player.setAttribute('controls', '');
      player.setAttribute('src', link.getAttribute('href'));
      player.style.display = 'block';
      link.parentNode.appendChild(player);
      active = {
        player: player,
        button: btn
      };
    });
    link.parentNode.insertBefore(btn, link);
  }
  for (var i = 0; i < links.length; i++) {
    setupPlayer(links[i]);
  }
});

[Lunkhead]

That's pretty cool! We maybe just need to give more of the page width to the center column to make room for the players, and less width to the right column to make room. I have never understood anyway why the right column was so wide when the real focus of the page is to my mind supposed to be the center column with the songs.