.m3u playlist question

[nyjm]

i decided to move my last album off of soundclick and to my personal webspace:

http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/n/j/n ... ve/mod.htm

i did this mainly b/c i just figured out how to make .m3u playlists. It's brain-dead easy - just open notepad, type in something like:

# Modulations Play-All
uptozion.mp3
spiraling.mp3
comeahellin.mp3

and then "save as" playlistname.m3u. upload the .m3u file (and all the called-for .mp3's) into the same folder and place a link on the webpage. easy-peasy. i updated my site last night and tested it at home with internet explorer. everything looked and played just right.

however, this morning i discovered that my .m3u files won't play if you view the page with mozilla firefox or netscape explorer. clicking on the play-list link just takes you to the text of the .m3u file.

that is superbly annoying, but i have no idea how to fix it. FYI - use MSWord to create my webpages at home. (at work, it's usually FrontPage.)

so, for those who don't use IE, how do i get my playlists to work? rework the page in FrontPage? change the suffix from .htm to .html?

help.

[deshead]

Your web server is forcing the MIME type of the document to "text/plain", which Firefox correctly interprets and displays as a text file. (Heh, yeah, IE is actually the one misbehaving!)

Can you play with the web server's MIME type map? It looks like you're on a university server, so probably not. (Your server runs Apache, so just in case, the file to look for is mime.types.)

They may allow you to create .htaccess files. If so, try this:

http://www.spartanicus.utvinternet.ie/f ... he_web.htm

(You really only need the second line in the example file.)

[nyjm]

ok, so, i think i understand. lemme summup:

1. open notepad
2. type "AddType audio/x-mpegurl .m3u" (this is known as a "Directive")
3. save as "htaccess.txt" and close notepad
4. upload the file to the web directory to which i want this directive to apply. in this case, i uploaded it to my root directory, b/c, in theory, the directive should apply to all the sub-directories as well.
5. rename "htaccess.txt" as just ".htaccess" (this makes the file "hidden")
6. tada!

annnnnd... no. it's weird, b/c there's plenty of documentation around PSU ITS (yes, it's a university server) about .htacess files and using them, so you would think that it would be supported. perhaps just not the directive "AddType".

i dunno, i guess [sigh] i'll just have to go bug some people here at PSU. thanks for your help!

[Niveous]

I thought making streams was far easier than all that. I could've swore that back in the day when Jack & I were doing Songfight Radio, all we had to do was list all the web addresses in wordpad, save it as an m3u and viola.

[deshead]

Ya Niveous, it's that simple when the web server is configured correctly.

nyjm, what you did should work (i.e. the steps are right,) but it's possible the version of Apache they're running doesn't support that directive. One other thing to try: use an ASCII transfer when you FTP the file to your server (Here's why: http://www.websiterepairguy.com/articles/os/crlf.html)

Otherwise, try contacting IT .. They've configured the server to allow mp3 files, so they shouldn't have any issue adding a MIME entry for m3u's.

[j$]

I thought making streams was far easier than all that. I could've swore that back in the day when Jack & I were doing Songfight Radio, all we had to do was list all the web addresses in wordpad, save it as an m3u and viola.

Never had problems with this - but I always use notepad NOT wordpad - and also save as a .txt file (get round any word formatting pecularities) and rename afterwards.

[nyjm]

ah-hah!

http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/n/j/n ... ve/mod.htm

just needed to use the <embed> function. what do you know, ITS folk who are knowledgable and friendly at PSU (the people who deal directly with my department are often of short of both competence and people skills).

now, i just need to get that cool picture back on the page...

- njm