Link to computer files

[jamiemac2005]

Originally Posted by Ass999

I'm not that stupid...

Neither's dm01 he's just covering all the bases. You clearly have something up on your computer, it's not a problem with the code but the way your computer's handling opening the MP3 file. Without having your computer we can't work this out.

A possible work around is to use a flash based mp3 player on the webpage... e.g: http://www.flashmp3player.org/

Other than that there's not a lot we can do.

[dm01]

You'd be surprised how many people call tech support because their computer didn't work, only to find they had forgotten to plug it in.

Have you specified the MIME for the mp3 file as audio/mpeg?

[ahmorrow]

Is there a space in the file/directory name? Any of them? If so, replace those with %20 and if there are other characters a browser can't parse I suggest you change those their equivalent.

[ss999]

I have sort of figured out the problem. Thanks everyone. Also thank you ahmorrow, although it's not what you said it lead me to the solution... But this is not fully resolved yet.

When I link to a an mp3 file in a folder like Documents or Music it works. But when I link to an mp3 file inside a folder on those folders it doesn't work anymore. I was linking to a folder inside a folder the hole time. Why does it not work?

C:\Users\User\Music\File.mp3 - Works.

C:\Users\User\Music\Folder\File.mp3 - Doesn't work.

[jamiemac2005]

Them URLs make no difference, what is the exact url of the folder you were inside? did it contain spaces or non-alphanumeric characters?

This kinda made me laugh because dm01's post was probably the most relevant to the solution.

[ss999]

Originally Posted by jamiemac2005

Them URLs make no difference, what is the exact url of the folder you were inside? did it contain spaces or non-alphanumeric characters?

No. No special characters, nothing really.

[jamiemac2005]

so what was it? there must be some reason. File permissions of the folder set correctly? Having another level in the folder structure shouldn't make any difference at all...

[Redcore]

What are you expecting to see? It seems like this is one of those situations where our expectations of how a web page works differs from what you're expecting...and we need to establish exactly what you want to get out of this in order to really help without driving each other crazy :)

[ahmorrow]

Try this. Have the file on your desktop, and change the folders after all the ../../'s to the correct path. That is, treat the../../'s as C:\ or file://C:\

.. means go up a directory and / is a folder denoted in any url.

Just make sure there are no spaces in your username or the file and there are no special characters like the following:
)
(
*
&
^
%
$
#
@
!
}
{
"
:
?
>
<
,
[
]
'
;

as they WILL screw with the way your file is opened--meaning it won't.

<a href="http://www.techsupportforum.com/users/user/music/folder/file.mp3">WhoCares.mp3</a>

Or, to test out your current code you could use something like:

<a href="file://C:\Users\User\Music\File.mp3" onerror="window.alert('file missing')">WhoCares.mp3</a>

[ahmorrow]

A few rules:

The file MUST be on the computer the web page is on. The only exception to this is if the file is native to other computers as well. Such as calculator, or command prompt.

The file must either be located as previously suggested by many others:

file://c:/folder/file.extension

or by using a relative location:

Originally Posted by ahmorrow

If THE WEB PAGE is in C:\users\user\desktop\web-page.htm (or html)
and the file in in C:\users\user\music\music-file.mp3
then you would link it as href="../music/music-file.mp3"

As said previously before '../' goes up one directory, or 'back' one directory... repeat as needed (e.g. ../ would go back one, but ../../ would go back two etc.).

A url is always defined as such:

transfer-protocol:// host-name. sub-domain. domain. top-level-domain/ directory/ file. extension

Transfer-Protocol: ftp, http, https, file, gopher, telnet, news.
Host-name: www+sub-domain
Sub-Domain: Can literally be anything.
Top-Level-Domain: ahmorrow, aero, biz, coop, edu, com, info, gov, mil, museum, net, org, pro, ar, au, ca, ch, cl, cn, de, ds, mx, uk, us (denotes--usually--organization, or country/language). These can also be used in combination with cc, tec, lib, k12, state, mus (to further differentiate the organization type).
Directory: A folder.
File: Name of the file.
Extension: html, htm, doesnotexist, jpg, gif (the list is actually pretty huge).

So technically speaking, if the server for some place was set up to use it you could use this as a url.

news://www.ahmorrow.techsupportforum.pro.us/this/page/does/not/exist/../../../oops/went/too/far/../../../../../not/mp3-playlist.jpg

Though it would simply show up as

news://www.ahmorrow.techsupportforum.pro.us/this/page/does/not/mp3-playlist.jpg

That is of course if it existed at all.

Now then, onto the rest of my little tutorial.

You can't use special characters or spaces, that's why everything that DOES have a space is replaced by it's HEX value. ' '--space--is known as %20 as an example.

That's why Vista did away with the 'Documents and Settings' folder--I assume. It wouldn't work without changing the space to it's hex value.

The directory for your music folder would be:

C:\Users\[YOUR-USERNAME-HERE]\Music

So to point to a file in my music folder if I were running Vista and my username was ahmorrow it would be this--in it's file:// protocol equivalent:

<a href="file://c:/users/ahmorrow/music/artist-folder/album-folder/track.mp3">

or as I said before, using relative links, if the web page you created is on your desktop and the music is in your Music folder:

NOTICE: No file:// is needed in this situation.

<a href="../music/artist-folder/album-folder/track.mp3">

Also, note that windows media player does not rip CDs as MP3s by default. It rips them as WMA... so if this is a case of mistaken extension, I'm going to blow something up.

Now, if you need any more help, your registry is REALLY messed up, your associations are simply screwed up beyond recognition, or you're just not getting this.