Music Player lost to Ning Plus - Any Suggestions

[Scott Bishop]

Once you pay for Ning Mini or Plus you will loose your music player.
Does anyone no of a good music player to embed on the Ning site front page (either the right or left side columns)?
If you reply with one that's on your site please leave a link for it.
Thx!

[Light Worker Z]

Hi Scott

I have found a hiqh quality music player to embed on my site. See it in place at the bottom of the following page if you like. Peace in Practice

The site to get the player from is: Project Opus

There are a few other players like Coffee Cup but it costs money and doesn't work on older versions of the Windows operating system.

It was a bit arduous getting the Project Opus Player going for me! You can see it is really aimed for singers and musicians to upload their music and broadcast it for possible purchase, BUT there are allot of songs free on the internet to download which can be added to a music player.

Anyhow, there are some songs from the Divine Song website which I absolutely love and must have on my Ning site, so with some resolve I worked out how the Project Opus player works.

First, you have to register. Then click on "My Music", then "My Collection".

The next bit is tricky. You have to add music NOT from your computer (oh noes!) but you have to add them as URLs, that is you have to use music uploaded to the WWW and better still from your own website if you have one.

So, upload your mp3s (public domain songs) to your own website (maybe find a free host) and / or if you are clever, find the URLs for free songs.

Here is where I got my songs from: Divine Song


You then click on the "Insert Web Music" button and see a box to paste URLs into.


To get the URL of a song I liked with respect to Divine Song, I clicked on the Albums of my choice, one being Winds of Change then next to the song I liked I saw the button "Download mp3" which I
right-clicked on then left-clicked on "Copy Link Location".

Then I right clicked and left clicked on Paste to paste the URL into the small square box. If you can't copy the link location, you should be able to see the URL or address of the mp3 at the bottom left of your screen (that is if you are using the Windows operating system), so you can then write it down so it can be manually typed into the small box where the URLs are added. It might help to press the Enter key on your keyboard to put a "return" in after you paste in each URL. I had trouble getting my URLs accepted and I think it has to do with their request for one URL on one line. Some of my URLs didn't fit in one line across the box but when I tried pasting a few times especially using "Copy Link Location" and put in some line returns after the URLs it did work.

Then check the box that you agree to the Terms (if you do) and click on "Add to my Music Collection". Wait a bit while the candy bar green stripe thing twirls and does its bit as the software analyses your mp3 and if the bar goes solid green you can then click on Edit to the right and change the title of the song, then click on "Add to my Music Collecton" again.

If all goes well, you will get a message telling you that you have added 1 (or more) songs to your collection.

From My Music Collection check the song you want to add to a play list or tick all of them and click on "Add to Playlist". Keep in mind that as you add the tracks, the last one you add will be at the top of your player.

Later, if you want to change the order of your tracks, click on the blue link "Playlists" then click on the NAME or title of your play list (in my case, Music for the Soul). Next to your default picture on the left you will see links for View and for Edit. Click on Edit. Then you can delete a track if you want to, or drag them around!! If you stuff up in the first place like I did and don't change a song's NAME to an appropriate and real or true title, you can change it later. You do that by going to your Play list, then clicking on the name of the song in the list (it will be in blue) then click on the small word Edit at the top.

Now, comes the fun bit. Click on Opus player in between FAQ and Shareback in the black bar or strip at the top of the screen. There you will see on the right a vertical design player and the code in a box for pasting into a text box on your own website. Just left click anywhere in the box with the code, right click and copy, then head off to your Ning home page and find or add a text box that you can paste the code into!! If you want the player to be horizontally aligned, just click on the blue word Horizontal" above your player next to Folio Version and the code in the box and the player shape will change.

Remember to add the HTML center tag before the code in your tex box, being the left angle bracket < followed by the word center followed by the right angle bracket; to centre the player if that is what you want. I didn't like any of the default colours so I went to Jen Social's hexadecimal colour page and chose a lavender colour. Let's say you choose white from the page (the first colour for sake of ease in this tutorial) although it would be wise not to choose white in reality probably, you see the code is #FFFFFF. Delete the hash or the # and find the following similar part in your player

code. src="http://www.projectopus.com/play/folio_player.swf?uid=83265&playercolor=F57E20&display=playlist

Jen Social Hexadecimal Color or Colour (if you are Australian) Codes

In the example above , the code for the default player colour is F57E20 and gives a murky orange colour. Replace the F57E20 bit with the hex code for the colour you would like, for example you would replace it with FFFFFF for white. But you wouldn't really want white if it will blend in with your white background, I just chose white as a clear example as everyone knows what white looks like (hopefully). In my case I wanted lavender and my code was CCCCFF.

That is it except for one tiny thing I noticed about the player that it truncates some songs right at the end or chops the very end of some songs off, when played on my PC at least, which I am not too happy about, being a quadruple Virgo and liking things to be neat. However, all in all, the Opus Player will do nicely for now.

Note that the player is limited in play functionality, i.e. it gives no indication of song length, no shuffle / random play or auto-start, though perhaps code for auto-play can be inserted into the code, and no volume control, but there is an icon to mute the sound, which may come in handy I guess.

Sorry for this post being so long, but perhaps ....... it will help you, and /or someone else, and hopefully it is acceptable also to Ning.

Cheers

Celine

[Scott Bishop]

Hi Celine,
I really appreciate your reply. I did play with the Opus player (found it googling "embed music player") but it's not very member friendly. I barely can understand how to use it.
What I'm really looking for is something to where my members can easily share their music as well.
I went and check out coffee cup but it will not alloy membership downloads.

Thank you,
-Scott

[Nina Bone]

Hi Scott,
Have u tried http://www.playlist.com/
a lot of our members used it instead of the Ning player, they liked it better! : )

Nina

[Light Worker Z]

Sorry to reply to myself but I want to say that I have taken the Project Opus player off my Ning home page, as it disappeared for about 12 hours one night after work, and I couldn't get to the project opus website either, so it seems they had some "down time" which was not good for my music playing. My friend found Mix Pod which I am very happy with. But you have to upload songs from a domain host or from a website.

Mix Pod Player

Below is one place which provides free "hosting" meaning you can upload songs and then get an URL for your mix pod player but u have to make sure u make your songs "public".

Fileden

Oh, and I did try to post this directly below my long post, but it insists upon posting itself here.

[amilla]

This is one of the new "Benefits" that the Ning said for. What you are looking for is one of my biggest "Headache" that i am trying to solve.
I am still trying to understand why they dont gave us the right to choose, between all functions, those that we wanted.

[Jill]

After paying for a year of Ning Plus I have only just found out we have lost our music player on Creative Cafe and I am really upset about this now. A lot of our members had their own original music uploaded and we had two players one for the latest music uploaded and one for the most popular. Now I don't know what to do.

I have looked at the suggestions in this thread and found the suggested Project Opus too complicated to understand and the Playlist.com is not available in the United Kingdom where I am based.

On another thread I have seen Hypster.com but that seems to be for every member to make an individual playlist rather than for a group player on the Main page.

So I don't know what to do and am very upset with Ning for conning us out of the music player. No way can we afford the Pro fees as we are just a small charitable group supporting people with disabilities and with about 450 members. We only just have enough for the Plus fees and I had no idea these mean being conned out of the music player.

Any more suggestions for a new music player we can add to the Main page would be greatly appreciated.

Jill
Creative Cafe Volunteer Admin
http://creativecafe.org.uk

[amilla]

I am exactly in your position! I am very upset because our members lost their original songs and now we have to explain what happen.
The solutions that i found is to use www.wix.com (it's free) in order to create the playlist from the songs that the members will send to our mail and to share the player with embed code.
We became hostages of Ning, and the owners have decided what they will give us without worrying that we have a responsibility to our members.

[Patrick Chappelle]

I can see some folks here never took the time to read the details of their chosen plans.

In any event, Scott, you can try Kadoo. Once you upload music there, you can run an RSS feed to your network. Oh, and it's free.

[amilla]

I can see some folks here never took the time to read the details of their chosen plans.

@ Thunder X
We saw the plans, we saw the prices and we also saw that we never have the right to choose what we want and what we dont want, according to our needs. I dont mind to have google ads for ning's profit, i am willing to sucrifise photos, text boxes and groups in order to have the music player back but... did anyone ever gave us the right to choose bettween the functions?

[P. Smith]

amilia I think that is a good suggestion. Don't pay attention to TX he always gives a verbal slap before he tries to help you.

Ning is good in some ways but they really haven't thought through the scope and need of members and different scenarios for those members. Those with disabilities don't have the funds to give them profits. I too have disabled people on my site. It's touted as a "social networking" platform. Now it seems its focused on business sites and profit. Sites take a lot of work, I understand the need for compensation. Another thing you'll notice is that your help ticket's have been given a maximum. With all the problems I'm reading with various issues there is no way 5 help tickets is enough for Plus plans.

[P. Smith]

I wasn't talking about you Jaap. Sorry if you felt I was.

[Patrick Chappelle]

Actually, Japp is correct. I don't do "verbal slaps" before assisting, and my remark was certainly not malicious.