Drupal Audio Handling is a Mess

Submitted by David Grant on Mon, 2009-02-23 13:51

The state of Drupal audio files support in Drupal is a mess right now. The audio module, which is great by the way, has not been fully updated to 6.x. This effort has probably been hampered somewhat by the fact that "audio nodes" is not the way that most drupalers want to treat audio going forward. The new drupal way is CCK module and Views and the new way to do audio in drupal is by creating a CCK type with a File field. The FileField module is mostly ready for 6.x (but still "alpha"), but one other nice addition, XSPF playlist module, which I need, is not even close. I recently tried to update a site I maintain, willmusic.ca, over to Drupal 6.x. Trying to get an album type and then generating an XSPF feed from the associated file fields was next to impossible without actually porting the XSPF module to Drupal 6.x myself. When I tried to use the audio module in 6.x to get an XSPF feed for an album type with attached audio files (using audio_attach), this also failed, because the audio_feeds module has not been ported to 6.x yet. So in the end, I reverted back to the original 5.x site, and got XSPF feeds working for each album and then hooked up a flash media player that accepts an XSPF playlist. All is good except I wish I was using 6.x. The moral of the story is that even though 6.0 was released over a year ago, 6.x is no where near production ready, unless you have time to develop your own modules, or you don't plan on using any modules at all.

Update (2010-02-03): the SWF Tools module looks promising, especially Flow Player which it integrates with. I starting to port the site over to Drupal 6 and I think CCK is the way to go, so I will go with CCK FileField with SWF Tools.

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Comments

Anonymous (not verified)

Sun, 2009-03-01 21:55

I concur with you. The state of audio of Drupal is a huge mess, and you're not the only one who's stuck.

Farrell Kramer (not verified)

Thu, 2009-03-05 12:54

Same here. i really think this underscores a weakness in the entire Drupal 6 effort. So many modules, not to mention every single theme, needed significant upgrades. Meanwhile, very few new features were made available for all this pain.

It makes me rethink my commitment go Drupal going forward. What will Drupal 7 bring?

Martin (not verified)

Fri, 2009-05-08 05:11

I am a beginner and this is my biggest suffering too. I ended up putting flash mp3 players by html directly in the pages. Unfortunately I can't use any taxonomy for my audio files this way, so maybe I'll end up uploading the files twice. Where do these mp3's go when they get imported anyway? They are nowhere to be found... Into the database?

Anonymous (not verified)

Sat, 2009-05-16 07:06

I totally agree with you guys. I am making a music community site using D6 and most media modules are working as they should except audio. I respect what the developers have done, but think they can do more for D6 compatibility.

featherbelly (not verified)

Thu, 2009-08-27 15:25

What about this:

http://drupal.org/project/mp3player

Not bad?

Anonymous (not verified)

Sun, 2009-11-22 15:48

Yeah, you are right. The audio handling bring a lot of questions to me. There is no module that works easy in every way. On my website Webdesign München i work a long time to implement audio files for customers. After a long time i`ve decided to break. It`s not funny if server don`t work in that way you wish it should work with audiofiles. I feel with you ;)

Monatshoroskop (not verified)

Tue, 2009-11-24 14:54

in my last company i`ve to fight against audio files in the drupal system. Drupal is in some way nice. But in a lot of ways it is so horrible :( I hope for themselves that they will fix there problems.

Kind regards

Eventagentur (not verified)

Tue, 2009-12-15 07:57

I also agree with your statements. The actual state of Drupal audio is horrible...
Best Regards from
Eventagentur

Anonymous (not verified)

Mon, 2009-12-21 14:55

We developed a medium-size music community based on Drupal 5 and audio.module. Now we are stuck from upgrading to Drupal 6, because the audio module isn't going anywhere. This is real bad.

Athena Adam (not verified)

Fri, 2010-01-15 03:28

Hello David, Thanks for a nice tutorial and raising some very good points. I visited ur site and liked its cute look emmensely -- very sweet. I feel you have succeeded in taming xspf playlist and audio module. Did you do it with Drupal 6? Please help me too as I have been struggling for long to achieve that .. showing playlist of songs in xspf extended player as you did on Will's album. Please guide me. I am usin g audio module dev version. I see no audio feed type views as it has been suggested there. i also tried using xspf_playlist module but it is not connecting well with audio module. I am just stuck. I will be very thankful to you for a clear step by step guideline. Thanks again.

München Webdesigner (not verified)

Sat, 2010-02-13 23:10

Does anyone know if there is also such a modul also for joomla?

Anonymous (not verified)

Tue, 2010-03-16 10:16

I love working with Joomla the easiest most robust CMS out The admin panel is a breeze article posting is super easy and with all the modules like CB and Virtumart there is very little limit to what you can do in Joomla

Alexei (not verified)

Mon, 2010-06-07 12:31

There is one module that let's creating playlists using Views and nodes: http://drupal.org/project/mediafront

I use it here:
MalinaMusic.ru/music-main

The idea is EXELLENT and it is very easy to implement in Drupal.

It is Beta stage though and still have quite a bit of cross browser compatibility problems. Hopefully they will fix it some day.

wouters_frederik (not verified)

Mon, 2010-07-12 05:04

I also use the MP3 player audio from this 'tutorial' . http://drupal.org/node/361984

Is this also combinable with ubercart.
I want the users to preview an audio file before buying...

Best regards.

Anonymous (not verified)

Sun, 2010-11-14 02:50

Check out the new audiofield module:
http://drupal.org/project/audiofield

It lets you create audio uploads as CCK fields (similiar to filefield) and you can choose between variety of players.

Joe Atzberger (not verified)

Thu, 2011-01-27 14:00

It's now 2011 and the "audio" module hasn't been updated in 6 months. Instead we have a proliferation of alternative techniques (FileField + View, Embedded Media File, etc.) all with a patchwork of incomplete version coverage and compatibly. There is no upgrade path from one to the other, or even between versions of the same dependency.

I work with a local community radio station and, in my day job, a large archival state government library. Drupal offers problems for both, in terms of presenting audio and syndication (RSS/podcasts) sensibly and seamlessly. This is a disappointment.

Rob deMallac (not verified)

Fri, 2011-03-11 16:03

I've gotten individual MP3 files to play using the Audio module, still stymied trying to get anything more robust involving playlists up and running...

I really wish someone would flesh out the best practices page with a few good recipes to follow:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/120909

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