When our client said he wanted music to play on his website, we were skeptical about the idea.
For one thing, music on websites has generally be considered a no-no among designers and developers.
However, in recent years streaming music has become more common on the web, and our client wanted to take advantage of the ambience it could add to his website. We welcomed the challenge and set to work creating a music player that would be unobtrustive and would fit into the style of the website.
The major technical challenge was to keep the music playing as the user navigated the website. Most music players would only work while the page was loaded, and the music would stop each time a link was clicked on, only to be repeated on the next page.
Some developers had tackled this challenge by never really reloading the page, relying instead on web 2.0 techniques like AJAX to re-write the page without reloading it, but this was considered too cumbersome to work with a sophisiticated content managed website like the one we had built for our client.
Instead, we developed a player control that loaded on each page in the normal way, but hid the actual music-playing application in an invisible frame. After each page loaded, the player control panel would connect to the actual player so that the user could pause, skip, and perform other routine actions. We believe this approach was the first of it's kind.
Many Branches On A Single Tree
