Audio_Feeds.module for XSPF, M3U, PLS generation

actually that bit relies on audio.module -- I'm not sure there's anything for audio.module to really steal there.

Oh! Wait, actually, if audio.module wants to implement that as a native plugin -- basically cutting the bonus pack out of the loop, I am completely for that. I think it needs more work before it'd be ready to go into audio.module directly. More themable, at the very least, so that the players can be more easily swapped in and out.

I've already got code that makes use of the slim XSPF player as well, I just haven't done anything with it yet.

+1 !

I want you to steal this too. Views = amazing.

Right on - I'm glad (for once) I posted about this on the groups. If you need help from a non-technical person who can't write clear documentation... well... I'm your guy! Seriously though, I probably can do a good deal of testing, trying things out, and other grunt work, if y'all can just provide a bit of guidance. There are all kinds of exciting things we can do with this type of functionality!

Gus

Alright, putting together some information, here is what I'm proposing. To start with, because it endangers everything the least, audio.module gains a second module, let's call it audio_playlists.module

The first thing it needs to do is utilize the Views' feed selector concept to create an 'audio' feed selector argument and then implement all of playlist's feeds. The code for those feed can be found here.

Once that's accomplished, audio.module needs the ability to provide a playlist to acceptable players. Colin and I chatted a bit last night, and one thing audio.module probably should do as it moves forward is to add a layer so instead of being themed, audio players can be plugged in, and then somehow the player is selected.

At that point, the only real difference is that certain audio player plugins can be set to accept 1) an individual song, 2) a playlist or 3) both.

So who wants to work on this? I don't have the time to actually do this, but honestly I don't think any of this is that hard. I've got plugins working nicely in panels.module so example code could be stolen from there for how to pick up plugins from a directory; then they can be just dropped in and an Audio Plugins project can be made so that people who are interested can commit them -- similar to the Views Bonus Pack.

Hello,

I have an idea to merge merlinofchaos' code and the playlist module's code into one. Basically the combined audio_playlist.module would:

1) provide xspf/m3u/pls/podcast feeds using Views so people could make their own playlists
2) combined with audio_attach.module (http://drupal.org/node/110960) provide feeds for audio files attached to a node.
2a) provide a playlist metadata table to be attached to any node. This would store channel information for the feeds.

Most of the feeds code can be generated using the current playlist module's feed code found here.

Most of the code to do all of this seems to be already written, it would just require merging and simplifying existing code.

Do you think its better to keep the XSPF integrated with the plugins? where should the feed code live?

Here is a rough version of the new audio_playlist.module. It will require audio_attach.module which you can get here. (needs testing)

This audio_playlist.module basically allows you to attach podcast/itunes metadata to any node type that has multiple audio files attached. It doesn't have any of the views stuff attached yet, but it does create xspf/m3u/pls/podcast feeds. It is still very buggy, however. Any help is appreciated. The basic idea is that it 1) generates feeds and 2) gives you a place to store podcast metadata.

Testers appreciated. Something is up and I can't upload straight zip files, so just rename the attached file to .zip

I just thought of something - I should probably split up each feed into its own module so each one is easier to deal with.

audio_xspf.module
audio_m3u.module
audio_pls.module
audio_podcast.module

Yeah that could work too. The only thing is that podcast feeds need extra attention because of all the extra iTunes tag stuff.

I'm trying to set up merlin's audio views for 5.0 and have yet been able to get it to work. Is it reliant on the playlist module? If you still need testers (not sure I'm tech savvy enough), possibly we could place a 'call for help' on the Dojo (http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-dojo).

I'm not sure I understand what this is providing that is not already there? I've been working with views_rss and the audio module to create podcasts. In that arrangement one thing I'm working on fixing is the lack of more tags associated with it such as itunes:explicit, itunes:categories, copyright, etc.

I was pointed to this link as having duplicate functionality as what I was proposing on http://drupal.org/node/113105. I didn't read every single post since so many are vague one-liners. But the comments I read seemed to focus on moving functionality from the views bonus pack to a new companion audio module.

Now granted the playlists I'm creating are quite simple, but using views it is easy and flexible to create and views are quite themable. In my situation the only things needed are more metatags for the audio module.

Why doesn't the current implementation of views, with views_rss, and the referenced views bonus pack not do what you want? Is there some reason why more audio metatags shouldn't be added to the audio module? It creates rss feeds (although they are not as nice as the views_rss module), but since that functionality is built in, it makes sense to me that it would include all relevant tags instead of needing another module to provide audio related tags. What am I missing?

scafmac: RSS is but one of many formats available for playlists. RSS is great for podcasts, but some things might prefer XSPF or M3U depending upon what they're doing. This is an effort to unify those so that it's easy to switch between formats easily.

That makes sense. Also drewish pointed out that there are channel level tags that I hadn't mentioned.

It isn't clear if this audio playlist bundle will work for all audio types. Someone mentioned audio_attach which is new to me, but there is audio node, media node, and mediafield for cck. Would the playlist functionality work for all of them?

Perhaps I'm missing something, but shouldn't the individual audio files be the source of any episode related tags, whether they are a node or a fieldtype on a node? It makes sense that whatever offers the feed should provide channel level tags. But I saw no mention of the same tags for individual episodes - generally the majority of itune tags can apply to both channel and episodes so functionality is need for both. I presume the playlist module will not be providing custom tags for all episodes within a playlist?

I don't know about the others, but certainly an XSPF feed will provide a full set of the fields available in XSPF for every track within the playlist.

I'm not familiar with XSPF, so that might be part of the problem, but it isn't uncommon for a podcast to have different tags / episode within a channel. I imagine a similar thing is possible with mixed playlists or compilation CDs. For example:

Channel:
<itunes:keywords>podcasts from example.edu</itunes:keywords>
<itunes:category text="Education" />
  <itunes:category text="Higher Education" />
</itunes:category>

Episode week one:
<itunes:keywords>super interesting crap, example.edu</itunes:keywords>
<itunes:category text="Education" />
<itunes:category text="Arts">
  <itunes:category text="Literature" />
</itunes:category>

Episode week two:
<itunes:keywords>dumb science, example.edu</itunes:keywords>
<itunes:category text="Science & Medicine" />
  <itunes:category text="Natural Sciences" />
</itunes:category>

If the XSPF view is creating tags for everything in the playlist, where does the episode tag data come from? It is either getting it from the individual audio node/field, using the same tags for each item (in which case the above example wouldn't be possible), or somewhere in the view you set tags for each item/episode? How will that work if the view is used for audio nodes? Tags about the node would be stored in the playlist but not with the audio node?

The code in feeds.inc used in the playlist module uses taxonomy terms applied to the audio node to generate iTunes category tags. But please, let's move this podcast discussion to a different thread.

This thread is about XSPF views.

Here is a more detailed proposal I've outlined regarding audio playlist functionality:

http://drupal.org/node/113750

I've proposed separating out podcast stuff into its own module because the podcast channel/episode metadata requires more thinking.

XSPF views would not really contain any episode/channel information. XSPF/M3U/PLS are really meant to be a much simpler XML schema for sharing a list of files, unlike podcasts which have a more complicated schema.

Here is a new version of the module, with both audio_attach and views integration. Creating one view will generate all 3 feeds (XSPF/M3U/PLS) at once for that view, and it will load the XSPF player when you view the page.

I've renamed the module to audio_feeds.module for clarity.

Everything works well, except I think there is a bug in the audio.module's code that embeds the flash player. It shows up as blank for some reason (maybe the playlist_url needs to have unescaped html characters?)

You can download the module here.

No, it wasn't clean urls because the other flash players would appear - just not the extended one. It's because there was a small bug in xspf_extended.inc.

patch attached

Yes, #114325 is a better patch I think.

Ironically #114325 breaks the audio_feeds.module player code if clean_urls aren't turned on because it passes an extra GET in the views playlist_url.

Usage with views.module:
your/view/path returns a flash player block with the xspf feed loaded in it
your/view/path&xspf returns XSPF XML
your/view/path&m3u returns M3U XML
your/view/path&pls returns PLS XML

Any ideas for how to structure the URL so there aren't any issues with non-clean urls? Or should we just assume this is a bug that needs to get fixed in the flash player?

If properly using hte url() function that shouldn't matter. I went to take a peek at how the url is formed but I couldn't figure out where and in what code this was happening.

Merlinofchaos:

I *think* the feed url code is fine (I've copied it below). The issue is if you have clean URLs disabled and try to load the xspf feed the flash player doesn't seem to be able to understand the url. Here's a better description of the problem.

/**
 *  Theme function to handle the XSPF view
 */
function theme_audio_feeds_views_xspf($view, $nodes, $type) {
  if (isset($_GET['xspf'])) {
    return audio_feeds_views_prepare_xspf(views_get_title($view, $type), url($view->real_url, null, null, true), $nodes);
  }
  elseif(isset($_GET['m3u'])) {
    return theme('audio_feeds_views_m3u', $view, $nodes, $type);
  }
  elseif(isset($_GET['pls'])) {
    return theme('audio_feeds_views_pls', $view, $nodes, $type);
  }
  else {
    $player = audio_get_players('name', 'xspf_extended');
    $playlist_url = url($view->real_url, 'xspf', NULL, TRUE);
    $output = theme($player['theme_xspf'], $playlist_url);
    $output .= theme('audio_feeds_views_links', $view->real_url);
    return $output;
  }
}

I think I figured out the problem - the above code creates an encoded url and then passes it to the audio.module player code, which encodes the url a second time. The ampersand gets converted to a weird looking string at the end which flash doesn't understand. The following code fixes the issue but it doesn't seem right that I should have to fix it this way.

    $player = audio_get_players('name', variable_get('audio_feeds_default_player', 'xspf_extended'));
    $playlist_url = url($view->real_url, NULL, NULL, TRUE);
    $clean_url = variable_get('clean_urls', 0) ? '?' : '%26';
    $output = theme($player['theme_xspf'], $playlist_url.$clean_url.'xspf');

You can grab the latest development version of the audio_feeds module in my development sandbox.

I'm testing this great addition in a future Drupal-music community. I set a "playlist" view just to try, choosing "provide page view", "Audio:xspf/m3u/pls" as type, "playlist" as URL and Content Type/Audio as filter. When I access to the playlist URL, I get an empty XSPF Player ("undefined"), but if I click the "xspf" link under the player, I can see the correct playlist XML. What I'm doing wrong here? XSPF player does not seem to load de XML playlist.

Just another clue: m3u an pls links work correctly (itunes loads the right playlist).

Do you have a link to this page? My guess is there is a problem with the code that embeds the player, which is related to ampersands. Also - what exact version of the audio.module are you using?

http://84.20.27.216/musica/?q=playlist

I'm using the last audio module version.

Whoops, I had forgotten to include a recent change. Try re-downloading audio_feeds from my sandbox, I think it should fix the problem. Let us know if it does or doesn't work though.

Now it works, but the playlist name keeps "undefined" and it does not load the mp3 image into the player.

Ok weird. The XSPF feed looks ok, so I'm not sure why the images aren't loading. I've added the paramater autoload=1 for the player which may help the initial load...again try from my sandbox.

OK..

I think i've finally arrived after 3 days of trying to figure out all of this stuff (including the original views bonus audio playlist which i've yet to get to work in 5.0)! :-). Part of teh problem was I needed all the latest stuff from your sandbox because other stuff posted in the thread here wasn't working. Second, my initiation to this was via view bonus audio playlist and it never worked in 5.0. the mp3 player would present after loading the view but it never did anything? i'm still confused as to why that doesn't work but some random post alluded to the fact that merlin's version may be based on version 2 of the flash player and i downloaded the latest greatest. Either way, if someone knows how to get that going, i'd be mighty glad.

i want to ask some questions about the underlying code to make sure i understand this thoroughly though.

You can obviously type any of these in directly in the browser:

your/view/path?xspf - returns xspf XML
your/view/path?m3u - returns m3u XML
your/view/path?pls - returns pls XML

And it will generate an xml file to the browser.

However, when you enter this

your/view/path:

It returns a themed view with an embedded xspf player and passes "your/view/path?xspf" as an arg to the flash player at flashvars="playlist_url=http%3A//example.com/%.....". Brilliant!

1) But it seems to imply that the same view is run twice on the initial page load of the view. Once to load the page and then once to load the flash player with the xml playlist. Is that right?

2) If so how can that be? what i mean is that when the pages loads, the flash player is immediatly populated with that mp3 info for each track which is obviously obtained from the myview?xspf. I do NOT have to hit play on the flash player to actually run myview?xspf. So how is that possible - how does the player execute myview.xspf at the same time you are loading 'myview' as the page view. As i said above, it would seem that 'myview?xspf' only gets run the minute you click play and AT THAT TIME THE FLASH PLAYER WOULD LOAD IT'S TRACKS FROM THE PLAYLIST. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around that one. Can someone clarify for me please?

UPDATE: i just went back and looked at the code - is it because you append an autoupload=1??? :-)

Other Notes/Qs/Suggestions:

3) If i'm in Firefox and I start playing an mp3 in the xspf player in ONE TAB and SWITCH TO ANOTHER TAB, the player PAUSES until i go back to the original tab. Is there anyway to make it keep playing when you switch tabs (possible param to the player that should be added to the code as a default)?

4) Since mp3 players EXIT once you switch to another page on the same site, this view implies visitors to a site must stay on the view page otherwise they kill the mp3 player. A great offshoot of this idea would be to make the player presented with the view a popup. Either automatically popup off the page (not sure if that's possible or if it would affect something i mentioned in 2 above) or create another link at the bottom of the page with your other feeds to basically pop up the xpsf player. That way, a visitor can surf the site and listen to the music in the popup at the same time uninterrupted. Make sense?

5) When i look at the output generated by the playlist the only FILE LOCATION information i can find is with the tags. However it's not really a file location. It's a node location!!!

e.g

http://example.com/?q=audio/play/32

If i randomly pull that url up in my browser it wants to popopen a default player to play audio node 32.
Since the xspf player is getting it's information about which files to play from the playlist passed to it, and there is no ACTUAL FILE PATH to the file, how does it actually find the file? I'm utterly perplexed about that one because that xspf player knows nothing about drupal?

6) xspf Player Configuration:

NOTE: most of these are requests for tweaks at the theme level so that if you want different xspf player looks for different views you can do it.

a) Because I'd like to have a separate xspf view for each ALBUM, how do i make the xspf player NOT display the album title and author (e.g. for a single album with 10 tracks, it looks dorky/redundant to have the album name appear in every track listing in the player)?

b) if i want to get rid of what looks like an img box to teh left of the tracks how do i do that?
c) autoplay (start the player playing immediately when it loads - possibley on a given track)?

7) I imagine that i could apply a taxomony term id to each ALBUM, and then create a new view with a filter on taxonomy term as an ALBUM for every ALBUM to create xspf players by album. BUT if i hand off a site i develop to a non savvy/ non technical user, it would be better if I could create one view that uses a taxonomy term as an argument to dynamically create multiple albums based on ONE VIEW. this prevents me having to expose the views config to the end user.

Would someone be able to present an example audio_feeds view using a taxonomy argument to achieve what i've outlined? NOTE if you can do this, it could actually serve as a lightweight substitute for the playlist module for audio files!!!

8) Last but not least. Pardon my ignorance on this one. What does the xspf feed ink on it's own provide? If i click that at the bottom of the view, it basically spits out the xml feed which is kind of pointelss. I assuming that for this to do anything, my browser or local operating system would have to have a plugin that automatically gets fired when a file with an extension of xspf is triggered. Would this be correct?

Ok. That's a lot of questions but i think they are valid questions that are likely to be repeatedly asked as your modules go live. Addressing them now will likely save you a glutton of issue posts later on and a lot of confusion on user end. In fact, most of these have to do with recipes / configurations for using the module. Answers to some if not most of this probably could be summarized and pasted into the README text for the modules.

Looking forward to your reply eventhough i'm sure you're busy
thanks

Thanks for testing out the module, glad it seems to be working with views.

Answers:

1+2) I think you may be getting confused a bit with how views works (understandably, it does so much!). Conceptually all views does is give us a list of nodes. That's it. So when you define a new view, you get a list of nodes that satisfy your criteria. How you decide to display that list of nodes (list, table, teaser, XML feed) is actually handled by a separate theme function. For most views, you only need to output one theme for it. But for our code, we actually take one view and theme it four different ways. Three for the XML feeds, and one that returns the flash player with links to the other feeds. This is more convenient then having to setup three cloned views and a page with a flash player to load in the feeds.

3) I experience this too. I think it may be a problem with the flash player, or with how firefox handles flash.
4) A pop-up link would indeed be handy.
5) The audio module returns a URL like audio/play/32 which actually redirects and serves the file itself. This is so the path to the actual file is masked a bit (although it's not fool proof). It just makes it harder to figure it out.
6.a) This is sort of hard coded at the moment, although it is a minor code change.
6.b) You could try using a different XSPF player, or modify the flash player to have a smaller width (audio.module issue). At a smaller width that box disappears.
6.c) I think you could override the views theme function in your template.php and add that extra autoplay parameter.
7) You can filter by taxonomy term, and then expose that filter to the user so they can change the argument. "exposed filter" is the keyword here.
8) XSPF is meant to be a shared XML format, like RSS. The idea is another website could have their own flash player that loads your XSPF feed and it would still work. XSPF is portable across the web and handles metadata well. That being said, nobody really does this yet.

i answered some of my own questions in post #48 before you posted #49.

A few remain though:

1+2) I don't think you understood the question. I undertand views and theming views perfectly well. reread the question and pretend you're looking at the html source of the page that was created by your xspf audio view. the embedded flash player IN THE HTML SOURCE ON THE LOADED PAGE has a param that will look like 'myview?xspf". I totally understand how this entire page is CREATED BY THE VIEW and it's themes.

What i do NOT understand is how the flash player on the page is SMART ENOUGH TO **EXECUTE** the php script parameter 'myview?xspf' AUTOMATICALLY WHEN THE PAGE LOADS!!! versus WHEN AN ENDUSER CLICKS ON THE PLAYER TO START IT.

Do you see what i mean? It's more of a flashplayer or browser question. It has nothing to do with views.

As i stated in my previous post i think it has to do with the fact that the flash player has an extra option/param hard code in your theme called 'autoupload=1'. I guess those params must be loaded automatically INTO THE PLAYER the minute the player is loaded on the page. Then it's up to the swf to decide WHAT TRIGGERS the script (e.g. a user clicks the play button OR the var autoupload).

3) This seems like a big thing. Have you ever tried to figure it out? If we both are experiencing it, others must be too. It might be good to figure this one out.

4) popup definitely handy. it's included in the playlist module by default and it would help prevent problem #3. How bout incorporating that into your theme. I think it would just be stealing a few lines of code from playlist module?

5) Ahh.. i did not know it was to hide files! I see. that means that an additional query is made for every file even after it's in the playlist. Question. Isn't there a way to move teh directory the audio files live in OUTSIDE OF THE DRUPAL site so that it's private and only accessible to the scripts? That way the scripts can see the audio files (including the flash player) but not the robots or a troller on the site?
Just curious?

6a) Where *exactly* is the album name hard coded.. I'd like to override that in a theme or amend the code myself?

6b) That's cool. I assumed that with the extended player if i didn't give it an image, that empty image square would just get out of the way. but i do have the source so i can do anything i want with that player in theory.

7) fyi, I don't want to expose the filter as an 'exposed filter'. I want to
make it available as an argument in the url path, e.g:

feedview ---------> view possibly delivers teaser view of all albums (e.g. all terms)
feedview/album1 --> view uses argument to display only player/playlist for audio tagged with 'album1'
feedview/album2 --> view uses argument to display only player/playlist for audio tagged with 'album2'

I should be able to figure out this #7 on my own. for whatever reason i've just not delved into views with args yet. I just need to play around with it. but if you know what i'm talking about, feel free to post.

Did you note how #7 views plus args really functions as a playlist?

thanks for the replies

subscribing

Ah, my fault, misunderstood your question. Yes, the player uses autoload=1 to begin playing on a page load. There is a bug in audio album art loading though which is why I put it in. See comment #47.

- Customization of the feed would happen in feeds.inc.
-Turning on the private download system in Drupal allows you to define a files/ directory outside of the public www directory. But note that the flash player may be interpreted as an anonymous user attempting to access the file and Drupal may respond with access denied - but this might be something that could be fixed by a clever server sysadmin.
- Haven't messed with custom URL arguments in views but I see what you are getting at. Would be awesome to just tag files and have the player auto-filter. If you figure it out, let us know! :) Shouldn't be too hard.

zirafa - Thanks for the heads up. As I posted in the same thread, there is a lot of interest and activity (in this type of thing) over at Drupal Dojo. Anyone who can provide some knowledgeable guidance and insight (pretty much counts me out) would really help move things along towards the ultimate goal of creating arts/music profiles and/or distributions.

Hi,
I followed zirafa's advice and downloaded and am 'trying' to test the modules in the sandbox.
Please forgive my newbie ignorance, but here is what I've done so far.

Downloaded latest version of audio_attach and audio_feeds from zirafa's sandbox.
Uploaded them to my audio module folder.
Re-downloaded older version (2.3) of jeroenwijering's Flash_MP3_Player.
Created new View, however, when choosing Type I was only given "Audio:playlist," not "Audio:xspf/m3u/pls." (I tried the info in post #41 and it didn't work either)
Anyway, I went ahead and created a View with Audio:playlist and filtered by node type audio and checked Block view.
I enabled this block and was able to play the mp3 files.
They did not autoload. I had to click the play button.
"User undefined" also displayed in the first track entry and right above that where album art would be displayed?
Also, could not get the block to rise to the top of my content no matter what I put the weight on so the player was always at the bottom of my page.

I am thinking this is all operator error and would appreciate any help as to what I can do to fix this. Thanks for these cool features too and allowing 'greenhorns' like me to test them and whine about my problems.

Heather

Running Drupal 5.1
Audio 5.x-0.3
Views 5.x-1.4-2rc1
Views Bonus 5.x-1.x-dev

My guess you are still loading the views bonus pack audio plugin. If you enable audio_feeds.module and have installed 5.0-dev of the audio.module you should get that Audio:xspf/m3u/pls which is provided by audio_feeds.module. Hope that helps.

I disabled the Views bonus audio playlist feature, but audio_feeds.module does not show up in my module directory. I placed it in the audio module folder and also outside in the main modules directory, but still it does not show up. I'm thinking I just don't know where to place files or if I'm even doing it correctly.
Thanks for your help.

Heather

Hi, you should probalby just put the whole audio_feeds/ folder in your audio/contrib directory. you need the .info file for drupal to recognize it.

Okay, I put the whole audio_feeds folder in the audio/contrib folder with the .info file and still nothing.
I reinstalled audio module 5.0-dev ran update and still nothing showed for audio_feeds in the modules directory. I placed the audio_attach files in the audio folder and nothing shows in modules either.
I'm thinking maybe another module is interfering, but at this point I don't have a clue.
I will try uninstalling Views bonus and some others.

Heather

subscribing.

Hello,

I have committed this module to audio/contrib HEAD.

Marking this as fixed. Please start a new thread for other issues.