Automatic Pilot - about pseudo-streaming mp3s

Automatic Pilot

About pseudo-streaming mp3s

This website uses pseudo-streaming to play mp3 files. This means that you shouldn't have to wait until the entire mp3 file is downloaded before it starts to play.

When you click on a link to "play" a song, the web server for this website downloads a one-line file to the web browser running on your computer, ending in ".m3u" and consisting of the complete web address of the mp3 file for the song.

For example, if you click on the following link:

Play Say Mongoose

you will link to a file located at the following web address:

http://www.automaticpilot.org/mp3s/lofi/ap_lofi_mongoose.m3u

This file consists of the single line:

http://www.automaticpilot.org/mp3s/lofi/ap_lofi_mongoose.mp3

You can verify this by RIGHT-clicking the link, saving it to a file, then opening your saved file in a text editor. In addition, in the "mp3s" directory on this web server (which runs Apache) there is a file called ".htaccess" -- you, the web surfer, cannot see it, but it looks like this:

AddType audio/x-mpegurl m3u
AddType audio/mpeg mp3

This causes the Apache web server, when it downloads the m3u file to your computer, to tell your web browser that this file contains the web address (URL) of an audio mpeg file (mp3) to be played in streaming mode. The web server will also tell your browser, when downloading the mp3 file, that the mp3 file is an audio mpeg file.

If your web browser is configured properly, it will launch an mp3 player, and the mp3 player should start downloading the mp3 file from the web server, and start playing the portion of the song it has already downloaded at the same time it is downloading the rest of the song.

Of course, if your internet connection is slow, your mp3 player might play everything it has downloaded so far; then you will have to wait until it downloads some more data before you can hear any more music. Also, if your web browser is configured wrong, it might make you wait until the entire song is downloaded before it starts playing, or it might not even try to download the mp3 at all; instead it might just display the contents of the m3u file (the URL of the mp3 file) as text inside the browser window.

If all else fails, forget pseudo-streaming and download the complete mp3. To DOWNLOAD Say Mongoose and play it, left-click the following link. To download and save it, right-click the link:

Download Say Mongoose

The file size is 572 kilobytes.

Hi-fi mp3s are also available for visitors with high speed connections or lots of patience.
Play Say Mongoose hi-fi Download Say Mongoose hi-fi
File size 4.45 MB