firefox and windows media player

[raftero]

i came across this http://www.thebibleway.com/download.htm which is audio and some people i knew were on it , and tried to open in firefox, it wanted to download not play, in ie it opened windows media player and played. why would not firefox? is there an extension i need or what. evidenntly its a mp3 format does that make a difference, i don't know much about that.

[doctorgonzo]

MP3 files are sound files. They're not going to open in Firefox; some audio player is going to have to play them. You can download another media player like QuickTime or RealPlayer if you don't want to have WMP play MP3 files.

[Statica]

Go to TOOLS > Options > Downloads > Under file types scroll down till you find MP3 and click the Change Action button.
From here you can either set it to open in the default application (if WMP is your default MP3 player then it will open in WMP) or you can specify a specific player.

I thought I'd expand on this as well...
Sure, a lot of people are used to seeing their media player launched at will when visiting sites like these with IE. You might find that with Firefox, even though you've done the aforementioned, there is a download of the mp3 and then it starts playing. The inherent issue here is one of compliance as well. The http:// protocol is not meant for running every which document on every which program. The http://blahblah.com/blahblah.mp3 really means that the coder is telling the server and the browser that .. look I've got a file sitting here that you can view. But to view it, download first and then view. When IE autolaunches a WMP file, WMP now takes over the duties of downloading the file for you. Which really should not happen, IMHO (where do we draw the line? IE at this stage runs on a pretty high security access on XP .. so now you could have files that could have associations that could get launched out on applications even though you have no intention of allowing it do so). It should be the browser to download the content and then pass it over to whatever application you want to run. However, should the coder have actually meant for you to "stream" the audio file s/he should've used a protocol specific to multimedia streaming.
For example:
Say you did the steps I mentioned above (there might be more than one MP3 format sound that you need to change the default action for).
Try clicking on link 1 then try clicking on link2
You should see that the second link starts streaming the MP3 file immediately.

Is there a reason for all this complication? Plenty, the least of which is to conserve bandwidth for the people hosting the sites. If you set it on streaming explicitly, most people would be perfectly content with clicking the link once ..listening to it, then coming bak a month later and clicking it again. his chews up bandwidth (assuming the person does not know how to save the file as...) By forcing a browser to download content first, it also saves on the b/w consumed by repeat users.

[TwoRails]

Hi raftero! Long time no "see." -- Not being a fan of too many plugins, and I don't like QuickTime or RealPlayer (it's just me), I would D/L them and play 'em that way. Just curious, but why not d/l then play?

...

Edit... Statica got one in since I started this post! -- Anyway, I do happen to have the QuickTime player installed and they play that way from the site.


TR

[Statica]

Originally Posted by TwoRails Hi raftero! Long time no "see." -- Not being a fan of too many plugins, and I don't like QuickTime or RealPlayer (it's just me), I would D/L them and play 'em that way. Just curious, but why not d/l then play? ... Edit... Statica got one in since I started this post! -- Anyway, I do happen to have the QuickTime player installed and they play that way from the site. TR

(sorry to take it a bit off the thread here raftero.. )
And that's part of the reason why I don't like QT, Adobe PDF plugins etc. They are just too bossy. However let's remember this .. when you install a Plugin, you are basically telling the browser that it is ALLOWED to pass on duties of viewership to the program. When your computer has a whole lot of file associations and file types, I think that it's bad form that the applications should now be launchable from the internet as well. The difference is between explicit permission, when you install the plugin; and implied permission .. a program is on the computer? well then let's all launch it!

[raftero]

i guess it's too much trouble, i don't want to dl another player just for firefox so i guess when i want to play these i'll use IE and wmp which i already have. thanks guys.