I spend quite a bit of time these days thinking and working with online audio.

Auto-play

Automatically starting any kind of audio playing upon page-load is dangerous. I have a very low tolerance for any kind of flash that loads if I'm not expecting it to, and audio makes it worse. I'm proud that Jamglue rarely loads any flash until you click on it, with the exceptions being the detail and remix pages for a particular piece of music, where your goal is to interact with the audio.

Yesterday we rolled out the first auto-play on Jamglue, and just testing it all night has been annoying me. It's on our Valentine's cards, which people expect, but I'm a little sad to see us cross that line.

Firefox (I think) has done something that helps a lot with auto-play: flash embeds don't load until you actually view the page. It's not a perfect solution, because it's easy to be tabbing through and start things, but it's a lot better.

To be fair, I see the appeal of auto-play on MySpace- they've created a place where that's the norm, and each user gets to control the whole experience of visiting their profile. Nonetheless I think auto-play contributes to the MySpace backlash that's taking place.

Finding the damn music

Auto-play wouldn't be so bad except that it's incredibly difficult to figure out how to stop it sometimes.

Modern tabbed browsers could fix this easily- indicate which tab the audio is coming from. I realize it's a tough problem, and would have to be at a pretty low level in the plugin architecture, but it'd be a huge win.

It could also happen at the OS level; give me a quick way to bring whichever application (and window) is loudest.

Audio (and other things) outside the browser

Maybe it's a backlash against the web browser becoming the platform of the future, but I've been turning off plugins left and right. I have all PDFs set to download (is there a overall worse plugin?), I often open embedded video links in VLC, and I've even been listening to Jamglue's podcasts in Winamp when I just want to catch up on what's happening there.

It makes me think there's really a place for Songbird to integrate well with Firefox in my future.

Maybe it can help with Greg's advanced recording desires too...

Today's photographic nomination is in Architecture:

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