Uninterrupted background music on website

Question

I was making a website for a music band, and i was wondering the best way to play background music on the website without interrupting the flow of the music (even for a split second).

At the moment, i am considering using frames, but this is not supposed to be good practice. Please someone tell me how i can do this. I would prefer to use HTML to code the website as i have not yet mastered coding in flash.

Answer 1

This might sound controversial, but here's an idea: Don't play music on your website. Seriously, don't. I think everyone knows how incredibly annoying that is, and asking a group of software developers to help you out with that is going to be like asking a group of sheep the best way to make a lambskin coat.

If you really have to do it, frames would be the simplest way, so I'd do that. But you're not going to do it anyway, right?

Answer 2

I can think of four ways:

• Frames, as you said.
• Make your entire website in Flash and have only one page. You need to know Flash to be able to do this, which could make this difficult.
• Pop-out your music player. This is probably the easiest approach, but the downside is this could be annoying, and a lot of web browsers these days would block it.
• Use AJAX and dynamically load all your site content within one page, like Gmail. Users will need to have newer browsers, and this will take quite a bit of coding on both the client and the server side.

Answer 3

It wouldn't be pretty but you could do it using AJAX. Have the master page with the header/footer/navigation controls with a big empty content div, and instead of regular links you have calls to AJAX functions that return HTML to be injected in the content div.

I tend to agree with the others who recommend frames. It may be considered "bad practice", but so is playing background music in the first place.

Answer 4

The only way to prevent the music from stopping is to not let the page your music component is on reload. Currently the only way to do this is to use frames, unfortunately.

The only alternative is to develop the whole site in Flash or another technology that doesn't rely on changing pages as navigation.

Answer 5

As was said, to do that you have to prevent your website from relaoding.

An option to achieve this might be to use asynchronous requests to modify your website content without reloading the whole page, that's basically what Ajax is about.

That being said, I sort of agree with Alex here : dont' play music.

Answer 6

This may be a topic for another post, but why would you cosnider IFrames to be good practice? you could out the content you want to change into an IFrame and have your code running your music player ouside it. When you load a page it woul load on the IFrame. Just a thought...

Answer 7

You would most likely need flash or a new window (pop-up) outside of the window.

Don't use frames. Ever.

EDIT: To all the people downmodding and commenting on this, not a single person has given a valid reason why you SHOULD use frames.

Just to clarify my position, please read ANY article on usability, the web, and frames.

For those still learning (and to those old people to dumb to update)

Frames break the unified model of the web.

Frames cause problems for search engine robots.

Frames make URLs stop working.

Frames break bookmarking.

Frames make printing more difficult.

Frames hurt accessibility.

Frames increase technical complexity.

and the #1 reason to not use frames......

USERS HATE THEM!

http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200411/who_framed_the_web_frames_and_usability/

Are there seriously this many people out there suggesting frames are a valid solution in 2009? How disappointing.