What is the best website solution for playing specific parts of online mp3 files?

Back in 2000 I made an educational website in which we had hour-long audio files of lectures on a RealAudio server, then I generated hundreds of little SMIL .ra files e.g.

lecture002part053.ra:

...
    <audio src="lecture002.wav" clip-begin="554s" clip-end="612s" />
...

then in the HTML I had links like this:

<a href="http://nnnnn.edu/lecturesparts/lecture002part053.rt">Play part 53</a>

And when anyone with the RealAudio player would click on the link the开发者_开发技巧y would instantly hear only that small portion of the .wav file.

The solution worked well, but the RealAudio Server was a bit expensive and the RealAudio player was unfortunately a kind of adware with ad popups etc.

So ten years later I can imagine there is a better way to do this, what is the best technology today to stream portions of audio files from a web server, namely, with these features:

• ability to create hyperlinks that play small portions of a large online .mp3 file
• a built-in player (e.g. Flash or Silverlight), such as this built-in Flash player one at dotnet rocks where -- if you have Flash -- users just see it, click it and it starts playing audio
• is a free solution and does not require a separate audio server

---

I would suggest using Adobe Flex if you are a programmer. Then you could create your own and have it behave anyway you want. Flex is pretty easy for Java or C# programmers to pick up, since the syntax is similar (well minus the MXML part).

I haven't made a MP3 player in Flex 3 but I did make a VideoPlayer with Adobe FlexBuilder. It was very easy to do and with flash/flex you can have the player look very neat (fading in&out play buttons...). There is an example on adobe's site on how to build a podcast player in Flex 3, that reads the source URLs from an RSS feed: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=Working_with_Sound_02.html go here and select the sub-node named: Example PodCast player.

Hitting your points:

ability to create hyperlinks that play small portions of a large online .mp3 file

You could customize the player to take FlashVars, so that it knows only to play a portion of the file. But if this is for sampling before buying I would suggest just having a short version of the sound file.

a built-in player (e.g. Flash or Silverlight), such as this built-in Flash player one at dotnet rocks where -- if you have Flash -- users just see it, click it and it starts playing audio

Flex = Flash, so yes

is a free solution and does not require a separate audio server

No audio server needed but you would need to compile your code. So you would need FlexBuilder(not Free) or FlashDeveloper(Free).