I have been a big supporter of jwplayer in the past, the same player that is supported with this software. However every major release the jw player moves further and further away from being a useful mp3 / music player and focuses on being more of a dedicated video only player. Take for example the jw 3.1x player line. It was a great player and back in the day represented a large amount of audio flash players. When 4 came out they dropped a lot of support for the audio artist, album, song, and description fields as well as the playlist layout and how it was able to display things cleanly and on a single line. With each passing release they focused more and more on video as well as removing things that were useful as an mp3 or music only player. Video images were added to the playlist with no way to change the shape so that square cover art could be added, control bar was set to no longer fill the full length of the player but only under the video window, etc.

It appears that the folks at longtail video are continuing on this trend with their new release of the jw player 6.x series. It looks like a great player for video but a very lousy and non customizable player for audio. Giving the excuse as always that they need to stream line the player and only focus on key features. For example they removed the ability to keep the control bar visible at all times. They removed support for all playlist and rss types except for mrss. As well as a bunch more. For just a few listed items, see http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player/28834/migrating-from-jw5-to-jw6

Now one really can't blame them as they are only focused on selling a video player as well as running a video ad delivery service. So focusing only on video really helps push those.

With a lot of the annoyances that myself and others have ran into with using the 5.x jw player with this site, as well as seeing a future full of even more problems if using the 6.x player with MC, I have been looking into other alternatives.

The alternative that impresses me the most is SoundManager 2. You can see it at http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/ It runs in both flash and html5 mode like the jw player does (and the html5 mode looks far less buggy than jw player ) It is a a very powerful player that focuses mainly on audio playback but also has some video support. The api is aweseome! The api allows one to control the player as well as pull tons of information from it. This could be really handy for your statistic apps and plugins. They have a lot of different templates / skins that have very unique looks and come in all shapes and sizes. This differs greatly from JW player which makes every single skin follow a very basic and set video player structure.

The player doesn't cost money like JW to use the full featured non branded version. The licensing is far more flexible so your users can use it a lot easier and stay within it's terms. It is also used on a lot of the main music websites out there. This would allow to put your product on a similar level as other big players. Some examples are soundcloud, last.fm, pitchfork, discogs, hype machine, turntable, audiogalaxy, opera, etc.

I am currently working on rewriting some of MC to work with this player for my own needs as I like the idea of having a player that does not call back to longtailvideo.com or their analytics site and hence will not be blocked by some filters and countries.

I would highly recommend you look into and consider this player as a replacement to the jw player as it would really bump up your product, not to mention save you from having to answer those annoying complaints from users wanting to know why they have to buy the jw player to do certain things after they just purchased your product :laugh: Not to mention they upped their price again with version 6, /sigh.

Thank you for your time. Sorry for such the long rant B)