I have received a lot of emails from people who are trying to implement Music Players on their websites. The individual web pages and tutorials seem to help with the construction but a lot appear to have trouble with the concept of uploading the folder containing the music files and the player assets.

Figure [1] below shows the contents of a folder containing some MP3 files and the player assets for the Simple Flash Player. In this case the player assets are the audio- player.js and the player.swf. Each MP3 file has a different icon relating to the application in which it was created or the one it can be played in.

Above is a screenshot of my FTP application Yummy. In the preferences I have set the application to upload using Unicode (UTF-8).

I have clicked on the destination on the server side of the application which is the folder iwebformusicians.com

When I click on the FlashPlayer2 folder that you can see on my desktop, the arrow in the top left corner of Yummy points upwards. If I click this arrow, the FlashPlayer2 folder will be uploaded.

My other option is to simply drag the folder from the desktop and either drop it onto the iwebformusicians folder icon on the server or drop it onto empty space in the second column.

Clicking on the FlashPlayer folder on the server side shows me the contents.

You can see how this application allows me to look at any folder on my Mac or the server all in one place.

To link to any song file in a folder, use the URL......

http://www.website.com/FolderName/SongTitle.mp3

When you click the publish button in iWeb, the application uploads your website files using WebDav.

You can upload anything to your MobileMe web space by using drag and drop to any of the folders that exist there.

To get to these folders, click on empty space on your desktop and from the Finder Tool Bar select Go/iDisk/My iDisk. See figure [3]

You can use any of the folders shown in figure [4] to upload files and folders required for your website.

For example, you can upload a folder containing some MP3s and the associated music player assets to the Music folder.

To link to any file in the folder like an MP3 you will use a URL like this......

http://homepage.mac.com/username/.Music/SongTitle.mp3

Note the . in /.Music/

Although Apple have trashed HomePage, this type of URL will still work until they tell us differently!

Next we’ll look at an alternative home for your files.

Apple has made things kind of confusing by giving us four folders called “Sites”.  One in the Home Folder, one in each of the local and remote iDisks and one in the “Web” folder on the iDisk which we are going to look at next.

Here’s a download button for you.

Control click it to download it to your desktop.