How to Post a Cool Flash Player on MySpace

MySpace has become one of the most popular social networking sites in the world. It is a place where old friends, who may not necessarily be close enough for phone or e-mail but are important enough to keep in a casual and less obtrusive social network, keep in touch on a regular basis over the internet.

With over 100 million users and growing, it has quickly become a place to show off and display your uniqueness. It seems that with the growth of MySpace, these individual profile pages are quickly becoming an extension of the self. The self image and the uniqueness that goes along with it are constantly portrayed on MySpace profiles. On a site where hundreds of people log on and see your profile each day, one must not only keep the page pleasing to the eye, but also entertaining for the viewers. With an array of attractive pictures, witty "about me" descriptions, and of course, a few background tunes to keep the guest viewer of the page entertained, polishing up and beautifying the individual profile page has become something of great importance.

As a user of MySpace since its start a few years back, I too have placed great importance to accurately portray myself online. More specifically, I have posted a flash mp3 player on my site complete with the artist name and picture to allow the viewer of my page to see and hear the types of music I admire.

I have rummaged through countless different in-page mp3 players for MySpace, including the default MySpace player option, with little to no satisfaction. I have, however, found one flash mp3 player which performs up to par - and looks aesthetically pleasing in doing so. This flash mp3 player, in which I have received countless e-mails regarding where it is from and how one may go about uploading it to the MySpace page, is from Jeroen Wijering from www.JeroenWijering.com.

Installing and learning how to setup and use Jeroen Wijering's flash mp3 player for MySpace may be difficult for one who has no past experience with html codes or scripts, but Wijering does a fairly good job on the 'read-me' section of his player's download. Of course, one always encounters problems and I hope this guide will help ease the process for those who may be new.

First and foremost, I must note that everything on this how-to is exclusively for MySpace and is different from what you need to do it you need to set up a flash mp3 player for a personal web site or anything outside of MySpace. Secondly, I do not work for nor am I getting paid by www.JeroenWijering.com to produce this information. It is merely a guide published by a user of Jeroen Wijering's product who is helping others better understand how to setup this mp3 player on MySpace considering the countless e-mails I have received regarding this issue.

Now, what does the flash mp3 player do exactly? It allows you to add mp3 music or pod-casts to your website or MySpace page. It supports playback of a single mp3 file or an entire playlist of many mp3s. I usually have a playlist of about 7 or 8 songs on mine.

To get started, you'll need to log onto www.JeroenWijering.com and download the product for free. When at the homepage, click the link on the upper center of the screen titled 'Scripts' and then click 'Flash Mp3 Player.' Download this player and unzip the files into your hard drive. You should now have a folder somewhere on your computer that says 'flash_mp3_player.' Keep this folder handy - such as on your desktop - because we will be returning to it.

Now find a few mp3 songs on your hard drive or download them from whatever music service you use. Make sure they are mp3 files. For uploading reasons, keep them fairly small to normal in size - something around 5 mega-bytes.

Once you have decided the mp3 files you want, log on to any file sharing web page such as Tripod.com or FileLodge.com to upload these files. I use www.FileXoom.com. If you have not done so, register with the site for free and simply click 'upload' to upload these files. It may take a while during the upload process.

After your mp3 files are all uploaded to the online server of your choice, minimize everything and go back to the 'flash_mp3_player' folder that you had just downloaded from JeroenWijering.com.

In that folder, locate a file simply called PLAYLIST. There are two of these files and don't let it trick you. One of them is '._playlist' and the other is simply 'playlist.' Right-click the mouse on 'playlist' and choose Open With > WordPad. Here is where the magic begins.

Here is where you do all the functions for this mp3 player. All you need to do is fill in the blanks. Where it says '' put the name of the artist for the first mp3 file uploaded and end the name again with '.'

For example, if I uploaded a song by Michael Jackson, I would write: Michael Jackson

Underneath this you do the same, but with the song title as the information.

Then we get to the important part. The part that says .

This is what tells your player what song to play and where it is. Simply put here the location of where your song is. Remember you uploaded it to the web page of your choice. Mine was www.FileXoom.com.

Simply go back to the site where you uploaded the song and find a link that says (all sites are different, but mean the same) get links or codes. Find this and copy/paste this information into the location section of the WordPad document you were working on. This link must end in '.mp3'

Here is an example of my Michael Jackson song from www.FileXoom.com:

http://filexoom.com/files/2007/1/14/53321/jackson.mp3

The last section of this is the . This is optional and allows you to have a picture of the artist you are playing. Do the same thing as the mp3 file - meaning find a picture of the artist and upload that picture to the same server web page. Find the code of this picture and stick it in between where it says . Make sure that the link you are sticking in is a .jpg file and keep it small so it loads faster. If you do not want to use the images, simply delete that line which says from the WordPad document.

Do this entire process - the artist name, the song location, and the image - again with your 2^nd and 3^rd and 4^th mp3s and so on. Note that the default WordPad document only has 3 blocks of space - meaning 3 songs to fill out - but you can copy and paste these blocks in making how ever many as you need.

Once it is all done, simply click >Save and return to your desktop.

Return to your file sharing web page in which you had uploaded your music. Remember, mine was FileXoom.com. Click upload and upload the following two files from your 'flash_mp3_player' folder - the folder we downloaded back from the JeroenWijering web page. Upload:

-'playlist' (the XML document)

-'mp3player' (the SWF document - not the internet document)

Minimize this page and keep it handy.

Now, go back to www.JeroenWijering.com and scroll down to the bottom of the page. Find and click the tiny little link in the last paragraph that says 'Feedback.'

Here, find and click the right hand side of the screen with the MySpace logo that says 'embedding Flash article.' This takes you to a new page with a 'code' for MySpace.

Highlight this entire code - it is all in red - and copy/paste this entire thing onto your MySpace account edit profile section. I have mine setup at the 'About Me' section of MySpace so I copy/pasted this code onto the 'About Me' section of the profile edit. Keep this page handy as well.

Once you have this code pasted on MySpace, go back to you file sharing web page in which you have all your songs and folder files uploaded.

Just as you had copy and pasted the link to the mp3 file and the artist image file, do the same with the 'playlist' XML document you just uploaded.

This should look something like this: http://www.AnyFileSiteName.com/playlist.xml

Copy and paste this link onto your MySpace code exactly where the default XML name is. It would be right after the "file=http://" and ends with '.xml&....' Stick the link here without touching anything else.

Do the same with the other uploaded file - the mp3player file which is the .SWF folder. Do the same here, but stick it in the place of the .swf - it should be the first line of the code.

Simply click save or update profile and return to view your profile. You should now have a working mp3 player that loads every time someone views your page with no advertisements or popups. It looks aesthetically pleasing to the eye and beats the old default MySpace mp3 player option everyone has.

Note that sometimes it doesn't load. That's okay. It may be that you need to toggle with some Active X or anti-spyware options, but generally it you just click REFRESH on your browser it should load correctly. Sometimes it just gets "stuck."

The first it loads it will be slow as your computer needs to upload and read the new information it is seeing. But after the cookies of this have been acquired and the mp3 player has been loaded numerous times, it loads much faster.
Enjoy.