I found out about this service from PodcastNYC, a great place for podsafe music.

One of the very cool benefits that Big Contact gives you is a web-based MP3 player, what they call a channel player. It aggregates all your blog posts that link to MP3 files and gives you a playlist of those MP3 files with the content of your blog posts as the sort of show notes for reach MP3. This means you can get a sense of what each MP3 is about, whether it’s a podcast or just music, before you click on that play button.

Once you launch the player (it appears in a pop-up window or new tab), it starts streaming the first MP3 file (so broadband is a good idea) and starts playing it. Pretty neat.

There is some code on the Big Contact site that I can include here so that you can directly launch the player. Unfortunately, that code doesn’t work. I’ve emailed Big Contact about it and I hope to get it up here at some point.

I also discovered a rather neat Flash-based MP3 player. Produced by Jeroen Wijering, it’s very nicely put together and dead easy to add your own list of MP3 content to the XML-based playlist. Take a look at my little experiment - this lists some of the For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report podcasts we’ve done this month that you can play with this player.

Similar concept to Big Contact’s channel player - when it loads, it starts streaming the first MP3. You can configure it to start playing automatically or wait for a click.

Go on, give it a go!

[UPDATE 29/5/05] I had a detailed and very helpful reply from Nat at Big Contact about launching the MP3 player, as well as resolving an issue with MP3 sampling rates (separate post).

The link for the player works fine. You can try it here -

Why didn’t it work yesterday? Not sure. I wrote this original post offline in ecto for Windows and tested the link in ecto’s preview window. That’s when it didn’t work. But it works fine now.

The extension supports all file and tag standards supported by Tag&Rename. AudioShell adds tag editor and viewer tabs to a music file’s properties. You can edit tags file by file or by groups.

Supported files and tags formats: mp3 (all ID3v2 tag versions), wma, asf and wmv, Apple iTunes aac (m4a and m4p) and mp4 files, ogg, flac (vorbis comment tags), mpc , mp+, monkey’s audio, wav pack, optim frog ( APE and APEv2 tags). The app include full Unicode support.

This looks very useful for MP3s used for podcasts, especially those you download that don’t have any or sufficient tag information in the file properties that work with playlist identification in programs like iTunes - helpful for setting up smart playlists, for instance, which you want to auto-sync to your iPod.

Published by Softpointer. Still a beta, but worth a try. Requires Windows 2000 or later. Freeware. Download AudioShell 1 beta 1.

(Hat tip: Home Computer magazine)