Playing Wav/Mp3s when users visit my Perl site

Posted by anthonysaulnier (anthonysaulnier), 10 April 2005

Good day, I am trying to set up my web site in using Perl on a Red Hat 9.0 Apache 2.0 server so that when people visit my web site a wav or mp3 file will play. I have tried all sorts of things such as installing and using use Audio::Wav; but I have not had any luck what-so-ever

. I have even tried using the HTML embed tags, but still no go.

I am using Perl and CGI scripting combined on the site and my site seems to work fine otherwise.

I was just wondering if anyone has any ideas on how I could set up my site to play wav files or knows where I can get good examples of code.

Anthony

Posted by admin (Graham Ellis), 10 April 2005

I'm not a great fan of sound on web sites ... so it's not something I've played with much. But I thought you could just embed sounds into a web site in much the same way you can embed images - I've just visited a Nursery Rhyme site and found

<bgsound src="midi/blacksheep.mid" loop="-1">

used to bring up the sound. I don't think you need Perl at all (??) - although you could usefully use it to manage and perhaps convert the sound file(s).

Posted by anthonysaulnier (anthonysaulnier), 10 April 2005

HI Graham, thank you for your reply, I did try your suggestion but it does not seem to work for my perl/cgi script although I am sure that it would work great in the htdocs dir using html.

I am still trying to think of some ideas such as framing pages, put 1 html page with teh sounds together with my cgi page.

Anthony

Posted by admin (Graham Ellis), 10 April 2005

I've had a play / written a test program at http://www.wellho.net/cgi-bin/demo/trainsounds.pl. Have play ... see if you can get anything from it.

Source code:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "content-type: text/html\n\n";

@sounds = (
"City of Truro on Lapworth Bank","http://www.vintagetrains.co.uk/sound/3440_lapworth.wav",
"City of Truro at Barton Bridge","http://www.vintagetrains.co.uk/sound/3440_barton_bridge.mp3",
"Silvertown and Durango narrow gauge railroad","http://www.naturesongs.com/recordists/durango1.mp3",
"Yellowmargined Flycatcher","http://www.naturesongs.com/ymfl1.wav",
"Surf at La Jolla","http://www.naturesongs.com/surf1.mp3",
"Black bellied Whistling duck","http://www.naturesongs.com/bbwd2.wav");

$soundwanted = time()%(@sounds/2);

$whichone = $sounds[$soundwanted*2];
$soundurl = $sounds[$soundwanted*2+1];

$listing = "";
for ($k=0; $k<@sounds; $k+=2) {
$listing .= "<li><a href=".$sounds[$k+1]." target=noisywindow>$sounds[$k]</a> at ".$sounds[$k+1];
}

# Following line added in to header causes immediate refresh to a sound.
# Another alternative is CSS2 ... if you have browser support
# <meta http-equiv=Refresh content="0; URL=$soundurl">

print <<"HTML";
<html>
<head><title>Sound Demonstration $whichone</title></head>
<bgsound src="$soundurl" loop="-1">
<body bgcolor=#FFFFCC><h1>Sound Demonstration</h1>
According to "HTML and XHTML, the definitive guide", the bgsource attribute to provide sound
integrated more cleanly into pages than other methods such as object and embed tags, but it's
Internet Explorer only. This page has a bgsound attribute and you should be hearing
<b>$whichone</b> if your browser supports it.<br><br>.You might also be able to sound by following
the links below that will load them in separate pages.<br><ul>$listing</ul><br>
All sounds linked to by this page are located at the sites mentioned in the URLs above and you
should check the copyright statements at those sites for condtions of use. We've just provided
the links
</body>
</html>
HTML

Posted by ed (ed), 19 April 2005

You could always embed a little flash file that plays an mp3 into the HTML. Flash does quite a good job of compressing mp3s so that the filesize is small.

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