Martin's Money Mutterings 9 March 2005

Former_MSE_Andrea

Click on reply to discuss this week's Martin's Money Mutterings.

credit-card-tart

On either the high or low mutterings I get "End of file reached" or get the words from Martin "Hello and" and both stops. Are the servers getting overloaded?

MSE_Martin

I've just checked it and it is working fine for me. Is anyone else having problems.

Can i suggest you download the file rather than having it open directly then play it?

martin

BaritoneUK

Hi there!

I think Martin's Money Mutterings are great! Keep it up Martin, and I love the idea of the articles being read as well. Sometimes I can't be bothered reading and just want to sit back, relax, and listen to Martins' soothing tones...well you know what I mean.

Just a few things about streaming- I did email Martin a couple of weeks back, not sure if you got it.This is a web design issue, but I think it would really help with the site.

Making Streaming MP3s available from a website for most browsers is really easy. You need to create a Meta file with the full URL of the mp3 file. Create a text file with the ending 'm3u' and put the full url of the mp3- this week it's http://mutterings.moneysavingexpert.com/MMM090305hi.mp3 then what you need to do is make the link to the streaming audio to this file. The browser will then stream the file- and there you are. It doesn't work in Firefox but works in IE brilliantly. Then all you need is to put 4 links for people on the site-

1) Streaming Broadband
2) Streaming Dial-up
3) Download MP3- Broadband quality
4) Download MP3- Dial-up quality

3 and 4 just need to be a direct link to the MP3 file.

To give you an idea of what I am talking about, I put the M3U file here- so if you click on the link you should get this weeks' MP3 streamed!

http://www.selectperformers.com/testing/martinsmoneymutterings.m3u

The other point is that the MP3 files don't have info on how big they are. This means when you are downloading it, the download box can't give us a proper percentage time left. Can you send this info with the file. I know you can do it (I've done it with PHP sending headers, but can't remember how)

Hope this helps.

PS. Love your impressions , Martin. I think you should do a different accent each week...

Jude_Cowie

I just can't download this. What am I doing wrong?

BaritoneUK

Jude_Cowie wrote:

I just can't download this. What am I doing wrong?

Can you be more specific?

Are you using internet explorer as your browser?
When you click on the link what happens?
You should get a download box appearing. If its says save or open, click open. It should open in Windows Media Player (unless you have any other media programmes that you have selected to play MP3.

If you give more details then maybe people can help you...

bridiej

Enjoyed it but it ended just as martin was talking about the budget and petrol...

credit-card-tart

MSE_Martin wrote:

I've just checked it and it is working fine for me. Is anyone else having problems.

Can i suggest you download the file rather than having it open directly then play it?

martin

Still the SAME problem this week. Even if you download the file, you only get the first few words. Could this be a problem with bandwidth on the moneysavingexpert.com servers?

MSE_Martin

sorry about this we're going to try and sort this out next week. Have you tried just downloading the file rather than playing it?

bridiej

Mine cut out again before the end...