Super cool. Where are you finding the skins? I went looking for some skins I made and put up on deviantart, but the download links are all broken. Do you just scrape the web or are they your personal collection, or are you querying a specific site?
Does it decode the audio files (mp3, etc.) into the low level PCM audio samples and play those back? Or does it use a higher level browser API that lets you play high level mp3 files directly?
If the latter, how can you still implement the equalizer?
This is great and brings back a lot of old memories. Something that would help this spread (perhaps if it was hosted somewhere dedicated to it), is allowing a URL of an MP3 or a list of other audio files to be included in the link so people can share a song "the way it was meant to be played."
Thanks for your hard work and for making sure it wasn't broken in Edge. It was really satisfying to pull it up on my Windows 10 Mobile without issue.
Alas, this is more complicated than just including a link. The mp3 needs to be served with permissive "CORs" headers, and most are not. I made the call, that it would be too confusing for users to try to support loading from URL.
Yeah, that makes sense. You would have to download the remote resource in the link and re-host it which can get expensive quickly. There are probably a few scenarios where DNS tricks would save the day, but not reliably.
For those who don't want to navigate Twitter for whatever reason (tracking, slows down your browser, bad UI, etc.), here's the content from the thread (the images and videos are still Twitter-hosted, by the way):
Getting all of this to work entirely in the browser has been a great challenge, and I've learned a lot. Thanks to @The_DoctorO for being an invaluable source of insider information. Thanks to @LuigiHann for catching many small places where I hand't perfectly recreated Winamp's handling of skins. Thanks to @ja2ke for the original retweet which I believe kicked this whole thing off more than three years ago. And of course, thanks to @JustinFrankel. ️
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(@captbaritone, I'm assuming you're ok with pasting the content here, but please let me know in case you have objections.)
No worries about copy/pasting. Twitter’s UI is not the ideal way to interact with this stuff, but it was the easiest way for me to put together all those short videos. Thanks for helping make it accessible.
That makes sense, I forgot about the pesky CORS situation. My thinking was maybe the <audio> or other subsystem that is capable of loading MP3s remotely (since they are media objects) could do the same for playlist data.
