Giant Web Audio Shoulders

Guitarist and Web developer Lucas Gonze (hear our podcast interview) made an interesting observation about my new experimental Web audio player.

In my article “Three Free & Easy Web Audio Players,” I noted how I'd been inspired by Gonze's Yahoo Media Player (codename: Goose) to write my own player, the Batmosphere Multiplayer. I felt sheepish mentioning it next to the polished Yahoo player because it doesn't work on some browsers yet. But Gonze focused instead on some of the ideas I'd introduced, such as rewriting audio links on the fly instead of simply plopping Play buttons in front of them, and auto-scaling the playback window to fit the caption and photo:

A cool accident of the layout of this article is that it captures a sort of threaded conversation among developers of web audio players. Playtagger came first, goose came second, the Batmosphere player came third, and each was an iteration of shared ideas.

As a guy who likes to open things up to learn how they work, I find that process the wonderful thing about the Web. There are so many ideas and clues just a "view source" away. Standing on the shoulders of giants, you occasionally see some earwax — and can clear it away.

Gonze goes on to discuss one of the deeper features of the Yahoo Media Player, its ability to transcend file extensions. Check it out; the source code is there to see.