Getting The Audio Module Flash Player To Display

Drupals audio module is a powerful asset for media and podcasting sites. But, as someone who has used the audio module for a podcast, I've learned that making it do what I want and getting the flash players to look the way I want to is often not obvious. So, over the next couple weeks I am going to blog about some lessons I've learned to hopefully make it easier for others.

Let's start with that situation where you have the audio module installed, you created an audio node with an mp3 file, and your flash player isn't displaying. What you get is a link that says Click to play.

If you uploaded an mp3 or wav file you should expect to see the 1pixelout player. By default, if you haven't changed the player in admin >> settings >> audio >> player the 1pixelout player should display. If it's not displaying the technical reason is because the audio module isn't able to detect the file type. Since it doesn't know the type it doesn't show the player. The audio module finds the file type in the node object at $node->audio_fileinfo['fileformat'].

The fix for this is to use getID3. First, download getID3 and put the decompressed getID3 directory in the audio modules directory. Note: Be sure to delete the demo directory in the getID3 directory for security reasons. Then go to admin >> build >> modules and enable the Audio getID3 module.

Now, any audio node that's created will have a value for $node->audio_fileinfo['fileformat'] which will make the flash player show for mp3 and wav files. Any previously created audio nodes will not have the flash player until they are updated.

Note: The 1pixelout flash player is the default flash player as of April 17, 2007. Before that it was the XSPF flash player.