Band Pages - continuous sound problem

Hello @ all,

I am working mainly for bands and record labels. In these websites you are nearly always confronted with the same problem: customers want to have continuous sound playing while navigating through the page. Additionally there might be sections of video-content, which should mute the main player when navigated to, to avoid annoying layering of sound.

I am new to drupal, but would LOVE to use it in the future. I know this subject has been addressed here before, but not recently. So I'd like to refresh the topic and ask for suggestions.

In the last page that I programmed (non-drupal, handcoded), I simply pull all content via ajax into one main div, leaving the little flash player alone. I wrote the player myself and finally managed it to accept play- and pause-commands through a javascript function, so it can be paused/continued by certain content.
this works pretty well, but has the disadvantage that one cannot use the browser's back-button, because of the ajaxed-content. (Unfortunately my customers love back-buttons too)

so, what other possibilities are out there?

- using a popup for the player: this is a no-go. people hate popups more than anything else.

- running the whole drupal in a frame, the player in a separate frame. I haven't checked, but assume this is possible (?) I am not happy at all using frames, but at the moment I can't think of a better solution.

any suggestions/ideas/comments appreciated!

[Moved to support]