webserver stream audio vs. audio cloud platform [closed]

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My objective is to build a web application that will allow users to listen to music on my website on their android and ios devices.

The question I'm deliberating over is whether I should host and serve music from the webserver or if I should host and serve music from soundcloud. I built a prototype for both.

When I serve music from my webserver, I can simply use the html audio element to play the MP3 files i have in the web directory. I can use Javascript to build my own scrub bar. This works fine for browsers on desktop, android and ios.

When I serve music from SoundCloud.com, I tried to use their Javascript SDK to play music. This worked fine on desktop browsers, but did NOT work on android or ios browsers. To further complicate the matter, I can't seem to find a url to the MP3 (or music) file, so I can't even use the html audio element to render the music. So although soundcloud.com gives me a nice CMS to work with, in the end, i can't build a custom player in html 5 for my audience.

Given this limitation with soundcloud.com, can I expect a similar limitation on other audio cloud platforms? What benefits to audio cloud platforms offer that a webserver won't?

Answer 1

Reasons to use audio cloud platforms:

1. you need to transcode your audio files to other formats

2. you want a more robust content delivery network (eg. serve content to a user from a server that's closest to them)

3. pre-built CMS system

Reasons to use your own web server

• if you don't care about any of the advantages above