The Active Server Page illustrated below
creates a playlist to be sent to Windows Media Player. The playlist
consists of twenty songs chosen randomly from a database of
available files.
This sample uses WMA files (Windows
Media Audio) but you can adapt it to include any other file type you
like. The function Title which creates a Title element for an
item is the only piece of code that would have to be modified for
additional file types.
What happens here is the ASP page
makes a database connection to your db with the file information. It
selects 20 files randomly and sends them back to Windows Media
Player in an ASX playlist format. Windows Media Player then does the
real work playing each song in order.
If you don't have access to Windows
Media Server you can change the code to use HTTP protocol rather
than the MMS protocol to play the files. Keep in mind that by using
HTTP there is no file protection. Anyone can save to their own disk
the music files. The MMS stream does not normally allow that.
No matter which protocol you use you
must create a virtual directory that contains your music files. Your
database should consist of a table with at least one field named
files. You could if you like use different tables in the database
for different types of music such as folk, oldies, rock, jazz, etc.
In this sample we include the full
server path to the file in the file field. That allows us to use the
same code for any table of music.
One method of creating the list would
be to use a batch file like this one with the output redirected to a
file.
for /f "tokens=*" %%c in
('dir /b /-s *.wma') do (
echo /virtualroot/%%c
) |
You then import the data in the file into Access or first into Excel
and then into Access as you prefer.
This is our sample database named
WebMusic.mdb. It has a table called Oldies which is illustrated
here.
|
ID |
File |
| 1 |
/oldies/70_080 - Kinks - Lola.wma |
| 2 |
/oldies/71_064 - Chicago - Does Anybody Really Know What
Time It Is.wma |
The sample code requires changes to
the server name, the path to the database and the correct table name
within the database. Otherwise it should function as-is. The server
name can be either an IP, a fully qualified domain name as
illustrated or a WINS name such as BLISS if the server were named
BLISS.
You can add as many modification as
you like. For example you may say the first item should be a welcome
message. Perhaps the 10th item would a message reminding the
listeners what server they are listening to ("Welcome to the Bliss
broadcast server."). And the last item may be a thank you message.
It's all up to you.
<%
Dim URLs()
Response.ContentType
= "video/x-ms-asf"
Prefix = "[HREF=" &
CHR(34) & "mms://mediaserver.your.com"
]
Suffix = CHR(34) & " />"
Set OBJdbConnection =
CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
OBJdbConnection.Open
"DRIVER={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)};DBQ=C:\ASFRoot\WebMusic.mdb"
SQLQuery = "SELECT file FROM
Oldies"
Set Result = OBJdbConnection.Execute(SQLQuery)
IDX = 0
if Not Result.EOF
Then
Do While Not Result.EOF
Redim Preserve URLs(IDX)
URLs(IDX) = Prefix & Result("file") & Suffix
IDX = IDX + 1
Result.MoveNext
loop
end if
head = "<ASX Version =
""3.0"">" & vbCRLF
& "<TITLE>Broadcast</TITLE>"
& vbCRLF
foot = vbCRLF & "</ASX>"
y = head
for x = 0 to 19
ThisRnd = RandomNumb(UBound(URLs), 0)
ThisTitle = URLs(ThisRnd)
s = "<ENTRY>" & vbCRLF
s = s & " <TITLE>" & BaseName(Title(ThisTitle))
& "</TITLE>" &
vbCRLF
s = s & " " & URLs(ThisRnd) & vbCRLF
s = s & "</ENTRY>" & vbCRLF
y = y & s
next
y = y & foot Response.Write
y & vbCRLF
Function Basename(FullPath)
dim x, y, tmpstring
tmpstring = FullPath
x = Len(FullPath)
for y = x to 1
step -1
if mid(FullPath, y, 1) = "\" or _
mid(FullPath, y, 1) = ":" or
_ mid(FullPath, y, 1) = "/"
then
tmpstring = mid(Fullpath, y+1)
exit for
end if
next
Basename = tmpstring
end function
Function RandomNumb(hi, lo)
Randomize
RandomNumb = Int((hi - lo +
1) * Rnd + lo)
end function
function Title(strTitle)
strTitle = Replace(strTitle,"HREF="
& CHR(34) & "mms://mediaserver.your.com",
"")
strTitle = Replace(strTitle, ".wma" &
CHR(34) & " />", "")
strTitle = Replace(strTitle, ".", " ")
strTitle = Replace(strTitle, "-", " ")
Title = strTitle end
function
%> |
Remarks
Response.ContentType
is required to inform the browser of the proper MIME type for the
playlist. This will cause the browser to open Windows Media Player
(or the default program for .asx files) rather than displaying the
list in the browser window.
This is particularly important in
Windows XP SP2 which verifies the MIME typing on all downloaded
files.
