Audio player changed appearance
-
Thanks for your reaction. But in fact this is a very disappointing and, if I may say so, utterly inadequate reaction.
Regarding problem 1, if I (as you suggest) were to manually rename all 73 current mp3 filenames, this would also imply the need to manually change the audio shortcode in 73 different blog posts, apart from my music page, that each refer to one of those files. Otherwise, all those pages would be left with not-working audio (file not found). I’m sure you’ll have some idea of the time such an operation would cost.
Do you really expect me to go to all this trouble myself, just to restore (and only partially restore) a basic function that was broken by WordPress coders in the first place? I would say that restoring this function (one that I paid for with my WP subscription) is your job, not mine.
Regarding problem 2, you offer no solution at all. Offering a playlist player that will always dump the entire playlist as a huge field of text links right into the webpage, without even an option of simple Previous-Next buttons instead (which is the standard solution with any player) is just plainly ridiculous. Sorry, I cannot find any other word for this right now.
With your last suggestion, migrating my sites to somewhere else, you seem to indicate that the paid version of wordpress.com can indeed no longer provide the trustworthy and reliable service that I signed up for a few years ago.
Well, that’s good to reckon with, but right now I have other things to do than investing a lot of time in the cumbersome process of migrating my sites. I still expect WordPress to deliver again what I used to get, and what I am still paying $200 a year for. I would say that’s a quite reasonable expectation, wouldn’t you?
Actually, I am beginning to get curious what professional tech bloggers on the web will say, once they hear about this huge mess WordPress made of this switch from to HTML5 audio.
Anyway, as always, thanks for your attention. I will patiently wait and see how far WordPress will get in recognizing and fulfilling its obligations over the next weeks.
-
Hi Henk,
Regarding problem 1, if I (as you suggest) were to manually rename all 73 current mp3 filenames, this would also imply the need to manually change the audio shortcode in 73 different blog posts, apart from my music page, that each refer to one of those files. Otherwise, all those pages would be left with not-working audio (file not found). I’m sure you’ll have some idea of the time such an operation would cost.
Changing the title of the media item should not change the file name. So, if you adjust the name of the song, the audio files should remain functional (i.e. you shouldn’t need to go back in and change out the file URLs). I did a short test regarding this option, and the audio files still worked after changing the title.
Regarding problem 2, you offer no solution at all.
Correct – there currently isn’t an option to hide the audio files in the playlist.
-
For your Problem 2 try this configuration using the “text” editor tab:
<div style="overflow:auto;width:#px;height:##px;"> <h2>Local Playlist Test</h2> [playlist ids="id1,id2,id3,[etc.]"] </div>Choose a width value that’s a larger number than the width of the playlist, and choose the height you want your playlist to occupy. The user can then scroll all the items in the playlist without the playlist being gigantically long.
Personally I prefer the navigation features of this new playlist (though not all its other features work for me). With the new playlist, all you have to do as a user is to locate the track you want to hear in the list, and click it – play will skip to that track. The navigation method in the old playlist was quite cumbersome.
-
Great suggestion Laurie! The overflow:scroll would definitely work to shrink the height of the playlist.
-
@uuccmc:
Thanks so much for trying to help. I’m sorry that I lack the technical knowledge to contribute similar damage control suggestions here in this thread myself. I don’t even know if I can implement all earlier suggestions, for I’m not a CSS whizzkid and I won’t take some university course to gain back some control over this new player ;-)To me, the original player was perfect for playlists. It was small, easily customizable color-wise, it unobtrusively played background music while showing the current song title within the player itself, and if the listener didn’t like the currently playing song, she just had to click the “Next” arrow. In comparison, the new player is cumbersome, primitive, ugly, and user-unfriendly. To me, it’s a pointless change for the worse.
So I will keep my entire playlist page offline until some better solutions come up, or until I succeed in migrating my sites to a more customer-friendly place. To be frank, to me the corporate attitude of WordPress reeks of arrogant disregard of what customers (their reason for existence) actually need and want. It reminds me of an earlier case, where WordPress forced the pointless new fad of “endless scrolling” upon its users, in spite of justified protests that this disrupted readers’ in-page spatial orientation and pushed the sidebar permanently out of view.
If you have a moment, may I put this kind of conflict (for these are conflicts) in a wider cultural perspective here?
While the oldest, internet-less generations are gradually dying out, the average age of all people online is rapidly rising; and this average age will keep rising for the next 15 or 20 years. This also means (like it or not) that average internet users are getting more and more conservative.
Against this background, there appears to grow an ever-wider chasm between (on the one hand) young cutting-edge developers aiming for trendy innovation-for-the-sake-of-innovation, and (on the other hand) the general public asking for continuity, ergonomy and dependability. Sometimes, those trendy developers get completely out of touch and simply seem to have no clue anymore of what the public actually wants. The most striking example, of course, was the recent (predictable) market failure of Windows 8: a typical case of pointless and counterproductive UI innovation, that ran counter to what an increasingly conservative public actually wants and needs.
Luckily there’s no need for an all-out consumer revolt against over-enthusiast hobbyism by developers. In the end, as always, the market will correct itself! In order to keep their market share, IT companies will become a lot more conservative and push back needless innovations to where they belong: into an experimental fringe, not in the mainstream.
What this audio player affair here shows, is that as a company, WordPress just doesn’t seem to have grasped the sign of the times yet. In due time, they will.
-
@henkvansetten – I appreciate your comments very much. As someone involved in the field of conflict management, I’m constantly confronted with situations in which the proliferation of communication platforms and technologies causes all kinds of problems, not only with the ability to communicate effectively, but also with unintended marginalization of many groups of people. As a 60-something, non-IT person with geek skills, I think I can look at many sides of the issue.
What you would describe as “arrogance” can sometimes instead be unwitting ignorance of the perspectives of others. An organization I work with, for example, whose leaders are otherwise quite caring and kind, switched without any notice from snail mail to email for a certain type of communication. The switch was not forbidden by the organization’s policies, but it marginalized many who either did not grow up in the email age, or who don’t have the wealth to have a computer. Some elderly persons felt cast out and discarded, and drifted away. What leadership lacked was an understanding of perspectives of others. That’s why I appreciate your postings: one can’t act caringly toward others without that awareness.
I wish WordPress leadership had acted differently. I have a close acquaintance in IT, who, when told about what WordPress had done, immediately speculated that there may have been a security emergency that prompted the sudden, unannounced, not-ready-for-prime-time rollout. Of course, that’s nothing more than rank speculation, but it would fit the facts. I’ve found the WordPress support staff themselves to be supportive and I’ve found that many of the comments I’ve made have found their way into their improvements. I also think that what afflicts the larger world may afflict WordPress in that what the support staff and developers see in the trenches probably gets lost in translation to corporate strategy.
It’s entirely inappropriate for me to open my blog one day and discover that my playlists suddenly don’t work any more. Such a public relations disaster is patently terrible for WordPress’ reputation, as you have pointed out, which makes me think the change was made under some kind of duress. I do know that Flash (old player’s technology) is regarded as a poor technology both due to incompatibility problems and due to security problems.
I use my own playlists frequently, and had recently found that the flash player crashed more and more. It was on the verge of being virtually inoperable. The new player is easier for me to set up and operate, because my playlists change often and because my users need a visual track list. It doesn’t seem to crash, and it seems to work on a wider range of devices. But that’s MY perspective. I can well see how this shift has been an unexpected disaster for you, if your playlists are long and static and you don’t want to display a track list. I understand why you’re so upset, and I wish WordPress would immediately restore your audio functionality. Anything I can do using CSS (and that includes hiding the track list altogether), WordPress ought to be able to instantiate promptly.
Hang in there, and thanks for sharing your perspective!
-
-
Maybe the best and easiest solution of the current audio player problems would be something I already suggested before: introducing two different audio tags, one for the new HTML5 player, and another one for the original Flash player (the latter offering all the original shortcode options such as “color” and “artist”).
So something like
[audio …. would be the default that loads the HTML5 player; while simply changing this page code into
[flashaudio …. would make it load the original Flash player and allow for all the original shortcode options.This would be by far the most user-friendly solution, in the sense that this would allow WP customers to choose for themselves which one of the two players they prefer to use.
@uuccmc: Thanks for your understanding. I belong to the fast-growing group of 60+ internet users, and I do indeed sometimes feel marginalized by developers whose UI designs look like they’re thinking most users are still immature teens…
-
Hi there,
There seems to be a problem with the new audio player in Chrome only. I have a podcast and upload hour-long audio files on my WordPress site. In Chrome, the file stop playing around the 12th minute, but works on my regular navigator (Safari). A visitor told me the issue, and told me that the issue appeared with the release of the new player.
My site is pointdevues.net, and there is such a file on this article for instance: http://pointdevues.net/2014/06/10/97-the-immigrant-et-the-wicker-man/
(It’s a french website).My Chrome is up to date (version 35).
Is this a known issue? How do I fix it?
Thank you very much,
Paul -
Hi,
I need to show TITLE about files in a good design and use LOOP with multiple files. How can I do?
-
I just tested the link you mentioned on Chrome, and I was able to play the entire audio file and skip back and forth past the 12th minute. Can you make sure the reader was on a reliable internet connection and the audio file just didn’t stop downloading?
In order to adjust the title, you’ll need to change the title of the media item under Dashboard -> Media -> Library -> Edit as explained here:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/media/media-add-new/
Regarding the loop, the playlist should loop automatically. Currently, there isn’t a shortcode modifier (like “loop=no”) to control the loop function.
-
I tried again this morning and it worked. I don’t know what happened in the first place. Could have been a connection issue. Anyway thank you for your time, it’s very appreciated. :)
-
Not a problem Paul! I’m glad this is working correctly on your side. Please let me know if you need anything else.
-
It looks like the WP coders are either unwilling or incapable of having their HTML5 audio player respect the original audio shortcode format. In my StayOnTop blog, wherever the player is set to play just one single MP3, it still does show no artist name and no song title. I retitled one MP3 as suggested above, but still no show.
Because I got fed up with waiting for the WP people finally getting it more-or-less-right, and I wouldn’t leave all my posts with a blank uninformative player, I’ve spent several hours today recoding 70+ posts that all had a single MP3 in them.
Visually the artist name and song title are now at least in the player again: I put the names and titles in a vertically enlarged player box, centered above the progress bar. To see an example: http://stayontop.org/2014/03/16/depression-thunderbolts/ (scroll down, the player is near the bottom).
In case someone else wants to do something similar, here is the basic code to produce this effect:
<p style="text-align:center;color:#FFFFFF;background-color:#222222;font-size:90%;line-height:90%;">Artist Name - Song Title[audio ...shortcode.. ]</p> -
Just to add to what paullandriau said above. I also upload hour long podcasts to my site and the newest one will only play in about twelve minute chunks, before it freezes. It will not budge after that unless I close the site and re-open it. Then it will play fine, but only for around twelve minutes, regardless of where you place the cursor. Never had this problem with the older player. Any thoughts?
-
Just had a friend try it on their laptop, and they also only got about twelve minutes in before it stopped. So its not my computer. We are both using Chrome though. Is there an issue with chrome and the player?
-
As of this morning it’s working. But the similarity of my experience to Paullandriau’s above makes me think somehow there is a delay with the html5 player being able to process large files on chrome? Ten hours or so? Not a big deal, but a hazard for people who post their podcasts with a flurry of e-mails to friends saying “Hey, listen to this!” Might want to wait a bit in the future.
-
Hi everyone,
Just to confirm, changing the title of the media file will only be reflected in the playlist if you’ve used the playlist shortcode:
If you’re using the audio shortcode, changing the name of the media file will not be reflected in the playlist.
I apologize for the mis-instruction earlier!
-
- The topic ‘Audio player changed appearance’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 