A poorly wrapped present for 2018, a new SPLOT.
It’s really more of an extension, the SPLOT Box is an extension/update of the older TRU Sounder one (made for building collections of audio content).
As a media “jukebox-ish” thing, this one can offer a site to share/collection audio content (uploaded mp3, ogg, m4a), URL links to the same, or from SoundCLoud, plus videos from YouTube or Vimeo.
Give it a spin at http://splot.ca/box/. Please please please submit any feedback, requests, bugs via as an issue in GitHub (it makes me feel like a real programmer when I respond there).
I’ve had a mind to do this for a while. JR gave me a nudge:
https://twitter.com/JRDingwall/status/942867993872044032
I decided to switch the parent theme to Garfunkel (another from the Anders Noren Collection).
His themes do not provide playback support for audio content, so that took some fiddling to put featured content with an HTML5 audio player.
The share form provides a field to enter a URL for the source, or to use the media uploader for the audio files only (once the file is uploaded, some jQuery populates the URL field with the uploaded media URL).
This is how we share media into the box.
There are also fields to provide info on the source of the media, and indicate a license (all of these can be toggled on/off in the theme option settings). Also, if you don’t want any uploads to a site, you can hide the upload form field element.
I tried some approaches to supporting uploads of mp4 videos and displaying with the HTML5 video tags. This was problematic in having to preload content for the preview to appear (I did find an end around), but worse was really problematic to mostly not working in iOS. It seems picky about the video size, codec, and almost everything I tried failed.
If I figure it out, I can add these later.
Anyhow, if you want to give the new theme a try, it’s now available at https://github.com/cogdog/splotbox. It’s rather lightly tested (meaning just me).
Grab a quarter and drop it into the SPLOT machine!
And one more time… Please please please submit any feedback, requests, bugs via as an issue in GitHub.
Featured Image: Remix of Rock-Ola Jukebox Wikimedua Commons image by Holger.Ellgaard licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA license with my own remix of uncertain origin.
