Help with ATAudio

About

ATAudio is a Archetypes-based content type for storing audio files on the file system. The current version 0.5 is based on the ATFile content type provided by ATContentTypes.

The former version 0.4.x was based on the ExternalExample provided by Christian Scholz in his ExternalStorage product.

This product is being developed as part of the Plone4Artists project (http://plone4artists.org). You are welcome to join in the development and report bugs as you find them. See mailing list and bug reporting section at the bottom of this README.

Usage

Add a new audio file to your Plone site by choosing it in the "Add new item" menu. You can then upload an audio file (typically an MP3 file) which is then associated with this object. The user can choose to either download the audio file or listen to it, in which case it is streamed to their media player or played back right within the web page using Flash.

You can also add an ATAudioFolder, commonly known as a "CD". This is a container for the audio files, which will display a track listing and show the CD cover image.

When you upload an MP3 file, the artist, album, genre, year, etc. metadata automatically populate the fields on the Plone edit form.

If you edit the metadata in Plone, and save the ATAudio item, the ID3 tags are written back into the MP3 file on the file system.

Through the use of ExternalStorage, the MP3 files are not stored in the ZODB, but on the file system.

There is also a built-in Flash player which lets you play back the files either right within the browser window, or in a popup window. There is a popup player for individual tracks or a more advanced player for playing an entire CD, or collection of audio tracks.

See docs/WebDAV.txt for instructions on how to set up WebDAV to facilitate drag-n-drop addition of MP3 files to your Plone site.

You can stream the files in one of two ways. You can either have Zope stream the files (default), or you can define the name of your media server in portal_properties/ataudio_properties

media_server = media.domain.com

There is a portlet that will display the 5 most recently published audio files on your site. You can add this portlet to the left_slots or right_slots property for a given folder, by adding this line:

here/portlet_audio/macros/portlet

There is also a viewlet_audio for use with CMFContentPanels (or standalone) which will display the 5 most recently published audio files in the current folder and its subfolders.

Install

Simply place the ATAudio folder in your Zope's Products dir, restart and install in your Plone site using the portal_quickinstaller tool in the ZMI, or go to Plone Setup -> Add/Remove Products.

Dependencies

See the DEPENDS.txt for a list of products that ATAudio requires. Be sure to get the latest ExternalStorage as previous versions will NOT work.

Documentation

See the docs dir for full documentation on Podcasting, WebDAV, ID3, Edna and Apache configuration. Also see the online documentation at: http://plone.org/products/ataudio