Posts Tagged ‘Media Player’

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How to Pimp the RV Media Player

General | From the mind of | 02/03/2010

Holida Sale

I’m not sure how you’ve been using the RV 2.0 media player, but I want to share a few tricks that can make the previewing process uber-efficient. Basically, I want to tell you how to pimp our player ;)

Before you start browsing for good tunes on our site, you might want to resize your main browser window so that you can fit it side-by-side with the media player window. (Unless you’ve got an unusually small screen, this should work ok.) After doing this, you’ll be able to see and use the media player simultaneously while browsing.

Next, I would suggest that you dive into our shop and start browsing through our releases, tracks, or samples (whatever your pleasure). You can browse through all releases, tracks, or samples, or you can browse through them by genre. Next, you can adjust your preferences to view 30, 50, 75, or 100 results per page. You will find a “cue all” button above your browsing results, which you can click to load all of the previews on a page. (This can be really efficient if you’re loading releases, each of which contain multiple tracks.)

RV INSIDER TIP –> After you get the previews loaded in our player, you can start pimpin’ by using the special hotkeys that we created. Here’s a little cheat sheet of commands that will let you avoid having to use a mouse.

* Space Bar : Play/Pause
* ‘M’ : Mute/Un-mute
* ‘P’ : Pause/Play
* ? or ? : Previous Track
* ? or ? : Next Track

It doesn’t get much more efficient than that! With a single click you can load dozens of previews in the player and then play them in rapid fire succession by just arrowing down. We’re adding so much good music to our site right now, you gotta be efficient to get through all the goodies ;)

Eddie


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The RV 2.0 Media Player Is Live!

News and Events | From the mind of | 04/17/2009

RV Media Player

Last week, I wrote a blog post about RV’s new agile approach to web development, and I explained that our philosophy will be to "deploy new technologies early and iterate often." Well, we’ve deployed another new technology now – namely our media player - and I wanted to discuss it since it’s such a central feature of our website.

Beta Caveat

Before I give a brief explanation of the features and thinking behind our new media player, I want to state the caveat that the player, like the rest of our site, is in beta mode. It’s functional, but it will become more polished in the weeks ahead.

Pop-up vs. On-Page Dilemma

If you’ve been shopping on electronic music download stores for a while, you probably know there are two basic types of media players: those that work in a pop-up window and those that work on-page. The pop-up approach allows you to enjoy uninterrupted playback while browsing through different pages of a site, but it has the downside of requiring you to toggle between two windows. On the other hand, the on-page media player approach prevents the window toggling issue, but it requires the use of frames or extensive Flash to give you uninterrupted playback. These frame and Flash solutions can have serious downsides in terms of crippling a site’s ability to change in response to your needs.

All of these considerations basically create (what Eddie B calls) the "pop-up vs. on-page dilemma."

Our Solution to the Dilemma

Our solution to the pop-up vs. on-page dilemma was to give you a media player with the positive elements of both approaches! How? …by combining a pop-up media player with an on-page playlist manager. Each item in our shop or network has a clickable "add to playlist" icon that allows you to add that item to your playlist manager. Then, when you’re ready, you can click the "play all" button to have your playlist play in our media player.

(more…)


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Getting The Most Out of The New Media Player

General | From the mind of | 05/23/2007

This is the second post that I’m writing about the media player and how I personally use it to shop for music on RV.

It’s not a complicated player and the interface has been designed to be intuitive, and take into consideration the problems you can have simply trying to arrange your MP3s on your PC.

I personally miss vinyl for a few reasons, but mainly for the covers – as a DJ you remembered where a record was because you remembered the cover. With MP3s and CDs we confined to our chicken scratches with a felt pen on CD-Rs and not really know where the hell the tune you’re looking for is. Dark clubs, CD-Rs and alcohol aren’t a good mix!

With the new media player you can help organize your music before you download anything, saving you time an money! It allows you to group selections of tunes you like into playlists, and order them in those lists. I touched on this with the first post, but will elaborate a little more.

Media Player Playlists

I like to organize my tunes by sound and date on my mac. It’s easier than trying break it out by label or artist in my opinion and doesn’t require me to read the file names too closely when I’m DJing. I know a lot of people who organize their music by label and release so whatever floats your boat.

The worst part about the process is that I need to wait for everything to download and I still need to manually move the files around and preview them locally on my machine.

The Resonant Vibes Media Player can make this a whole lot easier. Now, I simply create playlists exactly the same way as I would set up folders on my laptop. I can add and remove tracks to them easily, and preview them also. If I’m logged in I can also work on my selections from any other computer I use – so this is handy for shopping from work, or if you have 2 machines at home, or whatever.

When I’m ready to make a purchase, I can simply add a complete list to my cart, check out and then download, saving them to a folder on my machine which I have named the same as the playlist on the media player. All I need to do now is burn them to CD, and I’m good to go.

Another way I like to find music is through the header. It’s very useful being able to find music based around what you are listening to at that moment. I can discover plenty of goodies this way that I might have never got to through the site.

As we continue to develop the player we’ll be introducing preview load buttons to the site to help speed up the process of getting your music onto the player. I expect we’ll offer a button that will load the Top 10 Downloads into a new playlist, a button to load all the previews for a complete album, or a full page of search results, or even a labels’ complete catalog.

I hope that as time goes by people will start to realize that the experience of shopping for music online is almost as important as the music itself. We might not have the amount of music that the other bigger sites have right now, but we’re very focussed on letting you get to the music you want to get to quickly and easily. We understand that there is much more to the experience of using the digital format than the time you spend online, and keeping true to our tag line of “connecting you to what’s inside”.


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The Resonant Vibes Media Player – Feature Overview

General | From the mind of | 05/22/2007

I thought I’d do a series of blog posts to talk about the new Resonant Vibes media player, and a few of the things you can now use it for.

To get things rolling in this blog, I’ll give a quick tour of the features you can find in the new player.

Media Player

There are two parts to the player; the header which displays all the track information (or meta data) including the cover artwork. Underneath the header is the playlist and tracks area. Here you can mange your audio through custom playlists, sharing and more.

The header displays all the meta data for a given track – try rolling over a field to see it scroll if it’s too long to fit. Additionally you can now search the site from the header by clicking on any of the fields in the header. This is a big functional improvement for searching and good for spur of the moment searches when you hear something your really like! You can also drag the cover artwork onto a playlist to add the item to that list.

The playlist and tracks area gives you control over your listening in a way you can only do with our player. I suggest remembering to login before you go crazy and spend time adding lots of tracks to multiple playlists. The player should remember everything you have in it before you login, and then merge them with whatever you had in the player the last time you were logged in. However, I was testing the player for a couple of hours yesterday and ended up loosing all my playlists full of music because we still have a bug with this feature. Aaargh!!

Anyway, you will notice the drop down menus on the playlists and tracks. This menu will let you add to cart, remove, rename or share accordingly. We hope that the share function really helps create a unique shopping experience for you, and lets you spread the word about some of the great music we have on the site. You can also drag and drop the tracks to order them in a list, or add them to multiple other lists. Currently when you drag and drop and track onto a new list it duplicates that track onto the new list, but we might set it up so that it moves the track rather than duplicates it. This is where your feedback is important, so please let us know what you think.

The one over arching feature to the player which hasn’t been mentioned yet is the simple fact that you can now experience continuous audio while browsing for music on RV!! We have been stifled by our old simple player which loaded with every page, resulting in the audio stopping and starting for so long that it will be easy to overlook this key feature.

So, please take some time and test out the player – it’s a massive step up from our old one, and hopefully makes the experience of shopping for music on RV unlike any other download site. I personally find it very useful when trying to find new music so I expect you will do too.


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