if you're on broadband and have 5 minutes to help me out...

Yeah, didn't read the whole thread and FireFox blocked the popup.
Once I came back and read some more I unblocked the site and the MP3 started in about 5 secs.
The download took around 22-25 sec's at around 154kb a sec.

[QUOTE=Fig]one of my clients/friends has said that download speeds from his site have seemed extremely slow, trying to check to see if this is a prob or was just a server glitch. if you can check out judjohnson.com, give me an idea of how long it takes for the mp3 to start playing on the homepage, then click to the music page and let me know how long its takes to download an mp3 i'd GREATLY appreciate it. a note of when you did it would be great too. thanks y'all.

chris[/QUOTE]

chris,

never heard the music in the front page either. but I have a popup killer and that's probably what knocked that out. But, it only took about 30 seconds for the mp3 to start playing on the music page. Problem is maybe you over looked it or something...but some type of notification that the page is actually doing something would be great. As it is now, if you click on an mp3, it opens a new window and just spins...i think you know from experience that some people just won't wait even 30 seconds.

As far as downloading the mp3s:




About the pop-up or auto-streaming music, sorry, I don't do those...nor do I want to encourage the practice. ;)

Took 15 seconds for the popup song to load, and I was getting an average of 90k for the download. Pretty darn good over here.

well, looks like speed isn't an issue. if you happen to read this feel free to check anyway tho, if there IS a slowdown sometime it'd be good to know

ok, as far as the pop-up, other options? as the pages are diff html docs an mp3 embedded in the page would have to reload each time you went to a different page and would restart the music each time, not a real elegant solution. i'm open to ideas

ax, on the mp3 my thought was that if people want to just download and save the file having a direct link would be the easiest way to do that. i personally hate when i have to dig thru my cache to find an mp3 or quicktime file that i played that i couldn't link directly to. again, any ideas?

thanks guys.

chris

Well I waited for a while, then I came back to the forum, and realized it was a popup. So I set the Google toolbar to allow popups, refreshed the page, and the music started playing instantly.

Connection Speed: 3Mb

To work around the popup without using Flash...tricky unless you go to a framed environment. But after Windows XP SP2, IE will block popups, so the number of people that will see it will decrease day by day.

[QUOTE=Fig]well, looks like speed isn't an issue. if you happen to read this feel free to check anyway tho, if there IS a slowdown sometime it'd be good to know

ok, as far as the pop-up, other options? as the pages are diff html docs an mp3 embedded in the page would have to reload each time you went to a different page and would restart the music each time, not a real elegant solution. i'm open to ideas

ax, on the mp3 my thought was that if people want to just download and save the file having a direct link would be the easiest way to do that. i personally hate when i have to dig thru my cache to find an mp3 or quicktime file that i played that i couldn't link directly to. again, any ideas?

thanks guys.

chris[/QUOTE]


Well, back in the old days, you would embed the sound...remeber the [HTML][/HTML] tags? Now, im not really sure how they do it anymore. But what I would do is how gametrailers.com does their movies.

in a window, they offer the trailer to stream then, right beside it, they give a link to download the file. Personally, that's a little teadious...and I can understand exactly why you would have one link that downloads and plays the mp3...it's annoying to find it...but on the other hand...how many people might be missing it if they dont see any progress...so my simple suggestion would be to simply have a page load when at link is clicked that reads "please be patient while the mp3 loads." to let the folks know they...well...need to wait.

As for an alternative to using popups to avoid reloading the same mp3 over and over again...why not have a frameset. the top frameset will load the mp3, only needs to be 1px in height. The second frameset is the rest of the window...much like the way pank has his forums.

Maybe im just nit-picking though.

Mp3 download is fast enough from far over here. 65kb/s on cable. Took 10 seconds to load the music in the popup window(same issue with the popup on Firefox).

Having a smart popup blocker that only blocks popups it's trained to, I had no problems with the front page mp3 and it loaded in about 2-3 seconds for me. On the music page, the "if i was gone" mp3 took about 7-8 seconds to download, averaged 500-600 KB/sec.

It's 4:15am Central. Definetely not peak US hours.


edit: cleaned up and/or removed some of my comments.

thanks guys, i've seen no connection issues whatsoever other than hitting the site when the server had apparently dropped for a few minutes so that's a good sign. feel free to post anyway if you happen to see this and check it.

i had thought of a frameset but that's such an unelegant solution, especially since i actually got off my butt and used css for this i'm open to other suggestions on the pop-up if anyone's got 'em. streaming with a link to download is an idea tho, that's something i may check more into, thanks.

chris