jPlayer

Drumbeat Demo - HTML5 Audio Text Sync

Last month I had the pleasure of travelling to Barcelona to participate in Mozilla’s Drumbeat festival (of which more details are to come).

I very much wanted to demo the capabilities of HTML5 audio and so set about creating a demo in keeping with the theme of the festival - ‘Learning, Freedom and the Web’. I ended up with a very rough prototype of a web app that synchronised audio to text, word for word, more accurately it provided an interface that allowed a person to synchronise the audio to text and then demonstrated a couple of things that were made possible once this synchronisation had taken place.

So what was possible?

The first thing I found was that once I had the timings I could easily create a mechanism to control the audio from the text. Now by clicking on individual words I could jump to the corresponding part of the audio, useful for navigating audio and also potentially as an aid to learning language. I took this a little further by allowing the user to highlight areas of the text and having just that part of the text played back, which was um, an interesting exercise*.

*This feature is very very experimental and needs some love.

Finally I added a bit of razzmatazz, tacking on ‘Image Overlay Mode’, which is really a text overlayed on image mode, but that was a bit too wordy. To achieve image overlay mode in my limited time, I used canvas, however I’m aware that CSS3 is probably a better fit for this type of ‘animation’.

The code is very crude - it really was just flung together in a desperate rush to get it working for the Drumbeat Science Fair, so I hesitate to say feel free to take it and do with it what you will. But please do consider all demos posted on our blog open source and dual licensed under the MIT and GPL licenses.

Once again the jPlayer library came in handy, providing a useful abstraction and ensuring that the solution works on various platforms.

The demo.

Instructions :

1. In Sync Mode - press play on the player and use the space bar or sync button to synchronise the words with the audio.

2. Switch to Playback Mode to see the words synched to the audio. Click on the words to play the audio from that point. Try selecting areas of text.

3. Hit Image Overlay Mode if you are so inclined and have a canvas enabled browser.

4. Try Hack mode if you want to adjust any part of the timings and/or words.

Alternatively watch a screen capture of the demo :

mp4 | ogv

(Flash version coming soon, honest.)

Feedback and ideas on this demo are particularly appreciated. I’m also interested in possible uses (apart from karaoke ;) ) and perhaps other projects that I could collaborate with to make something genuinely useful.

Thanks to @elmook, @f1lt3r, @sroux, @aulentina and others who gave feedback and encouragement. Special thanks to @bluetezza for the original idea.

Mark B

Sunday, December 5th, 2010 Audio, HTML5, jPlayer, jQuery, javascript 24 Comments

jPlayer: the CSS styleable jQuery audio player plugin

[Edit: jPlayer 2.x now supports video. Released 20th December 2010.]

With the jPlayer plugin for jQuery it is possible to include a fully customizable mp3 player on webpages. jPlayer has been developed by Happyworm and features standard track and volume controls as well as the possibility to play a playlist.

jPlayer Demo

jPlayer Features:

  • play and control mp3 files in your webpage
  • create and style an mp3 player using just HTML and CSS
  • add sound effects to your jQuery projects
  • improved bandwidth in HTML5 with alternative ogg format support

What’s unique about this plugin is that the designer has full CSS control over the audio player on their webpage. Using standard HTML and CSS, they can style the audio player to be added to their site so that it fits with their overall site design.

The plugin checks for and uses HTML5 <audio> tag support for mp3 and ogg formats in complaint browsers, otherwise it uses a piece of Flash to play the mp3 files. This is hidden from view and the final look of the site is entirely up to the designer. As you’d expect, the operations of the plugin may be customised using bespoke javascript code in the webpages to perform whatever functions required.

For example, the following code automatically plays and then repeats ‘elvis.mp3′ or ‘elvis.ogg’ depending on browser support. Play, pause and stop controls are also made available.

$(document).ready(function(){
	$("#jquery_jplayer").jPlayer({ // Instantiate the plugin
		ready: function () { // Executed when the plugin is ready
			this.element.jPlayer("setFile", "elvis.mp3", "elvis.ogg").jPlayer("play"); // Auto-play the audio
		},
		oggSupport: true,
		customCssIds: true
	});

	$("#jquery_jplayer").jPlayer("cssId", "play", "play_button"); // Associates play
	$("#jquery_jplayer").jPlayer("cssId", "pause", "pause_button"); // Associates pause
	$("#jquery_jplayer").jPlayer("cssId", "stop", "stop_button"); // Associates stop

	$("#jquery_jplayer").jPlayer("onSoundComplete", function() { // Executed when the mp3 ends
		this.element.jPlayer("play"); // Auto-repeat
	});
});

<body>
<div id="jquery_jplayer"> </div>
<ul>
	<li id="play_button"> play </li>
	<li id="pause_button"> pause </li>
	<li id="stop_button"> stop </li>
</ul>
</body>
    The MP3 files used must be encoded according to the browser’s Flash Plugin limitations:

  • Constant Bitrate Encoded.
  • Sample Rate a multiple of 11,0025Hz. ie., 22,050Hz and 44,100Hz are valid sample rates.

Please use the jPlayer Google Group for support, bug reports and general discussion.

Mark P

NB: This post has been updated for jPlayer 1.x series. Please visit the main site for the latest documentation for jPlayer 2.x and above.

NB: This thread has been closed. Please use the jPlayer Google Group for support requests.

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 CSS, HTML, flash, jPlayer, jQuery, javascript 147 Comments
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