Alternatives to Cakewalk Publisher

For some reason, I can no longer get the Publisher player to play - it loads but hangs in the web page "loading playlist". Given that Publisher doesn't seem to be actively supported by Cakewalk-by-Roland, and Flash seems to be on its way out (courtesy of Apple) can anyone recommend an alternative embeddable player? Ideally, it will be able to use the .xspf playlist format (ex Publisher); play formats of music files; be HTML 5 based (but with a fall-back to Flash for older browsers; be skinnable (or at least good looking!); display album art, etc. Well, I did say "ideally", but I realise that some compromises may be necessary. Oh, did I say, preferably it won't require hours of coding HTML, JS and CSS to get it to work in practice!

dlion16


check out the jw player. http://www.longtailvideo.com/jw-player/

nice alternative

  Well, I've now got it working on my test site, and it looks and performs pretty well. It wasn't as straightforward as I'd hoped. Getting it playing "something" was easy, but it took me several hours of hacking to get it working with a separate playlist across all of the platforms that I have available to test against. The two worst time burners were - 1) It uses a kind of RSS format for the playlist, and hand-coding this was a bit tedious. (I couldn't find any kind of tool for simplifying that unfortunately). 2) It gave a somewhat misleading error message on Gecko-based browsers (e.g. Firefox and Opera) and it took me some while to figure out that I needed to force it to "prefer" Flash (default is HTML5) to sidestep that. This was not really what I wanted, but it seems to work for the moment, at least. Now just trying to decide whether to play around with custom skins or just get on and roll it out to my "production" site! It's a shame Cake hasn't keep faith with Publisher, which at least semi-automated most of the process. Thanks again for suggesting JWplayer.