Whilst there is a good deal of fuss made about multimedia content on the web these days, for many home office users, most of the tools available are complex, expensive and difficult and time-consuming to learn. Solutions are often not cross-browser compatible.
Coffee Cup Web Juke Box is one of a range of applications from the company that offers simple tools to manipulate Flash-based multimedia content. The product is available as a free trial with a $34 license fee beyond the trial period. Whilst this may appear to be a single function product, in reality it combines audio conversion from CD to .mp3 and from thence to the Flash format, basic web page development and FTP facilities to upload the files to your server.
The starting point is to set the audio options that you require:
Select Skin - This option will allow you to select from the 31 skins available to customize the look of your JukeBox.
Play First Song on Startup - Checking this checkbox will play the first song in your list when your Web page loads in the browser.
Repeat Playlist– This option will allow you to repeat the songs in your list. This will loop your songs for continuous play.
Shuffle Songs – This option will allow you to play your music in a random order instead of the same order you have in your list.
Fix For Displaying Activate Content – This option will remove the need with Internet Explorer to have to click to active the control for the Juke Box.
Once you have set up the audio options and selected a skin of your choice, the next step is adding an audio clip of your choice. This option is selected from the main tool bar. This audio may be either in mp3 format or ripped from a CD. The audio is saved in the proprietary CoffeeCup Web Video Player format, based upon xml and incorporating an .swf file. Once these files have been created, then you can upload the 5 audio files to your server, and add the HTML code to your own HTML page.
The tool works very smoothly in my experience. The results are very effective and can be seamlessly integrated into existing HTML code.
Browser compatibility is less of an issue with the option in version 4.5 to run automatically in Internet Explorer, however, the supplied HTML code suffers from the same W3C compliance issues as the HTML generated by CoffeeCup Firestarter. A more reductionist code can be used which will meet W3C requirements:
<object data="video.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="500" height="500">
<param name="movie" value="video.swf" />
</object>
A nice touch is that if you use either of the CoffeeCup FTP clients, the file upload facility will detect your settings. Another nice option is the hidden skin which allows you to embed audio easily into a web page without having a visible media player, which may be attractive when adding a voiceover to your web page. The use of Flash makes this platform and browser independent.
Compared with its video counterpart, this application offers a limited range of formats, and if you are going to more than rip CDs are existing mp3 files, you will need either CoffeeCup’s own CoffeeCup MP3 Rip & Burn application of the excellent free Audacity utility which provides editing facilities as well.
Finally although the application warns that it will not allow you to rip DRM protected music, the comments about copyright in the Help documentation seem to me to be inciting people to breach copyright law at least as it applies in the UK.
With this warning, the tool represents a very effective way for home office users to add audio music clips or voiceovers to their web sites.
