Web Coding Audio File

[smasonM7CL]

Our IT staff member at my church is trying to get our sermons on our website for the church and is wondering if their is a way to have the audio files to begin playing while downloading. That way people do not have to wait forever till they can listen to it. Any ideas? thanks!

[yeahforbes]

When the recording software is in the process of creating the audio file, the web server will not be able to (properly) serve the file. At best, it takes however much there currently is and copies it to it's temp folder and serves that, thus never serving a "start-to-finish" file until the "finish" exists.

There's the option of regular old streaming, which requires special server considerations, but people tuning in late wouldn't get to hear what they missed until the complete recording is available afterwards (maybe this is good enough). Your idea effectively requires that each stream served has a unique delay.

Since streaming to multiple users requires a lot of bandwidth, companies exist that act as repeaters -- you stream to them and they rebroadcast to the audience so you don't bear the load yourself. Talk with people from these companies and see if somebody has the technology to do what I am calling "unique delay." I wouldn't bet on it though... audio/video consumption is typically fully real-time (broadcast) or fully pre-recorded. This is the gray area in between that not many folks would ever need!

[Yoder54]

Here is a snip-it of HTML using the "embed" tag. Note that autostart is set to "true."

<embed src="Summertime.m4a" width="364" height="32" autostart="False"></embed>