Why you don't download all of them at once? This would avoid downloading them each time the sketch is run, which can be time consuming, and indeed prone to failure.

Hi phi.lho,

Why you don't download all of them at once? This would avoid downloading them each time the sketch is run, which can be time consuming, and indeed prone to failure.

Yes, if i know which mp3 i want to use inside my sketch i would just download it and put it into the sketches folder.

But i am thinking about a sketch where the user can decide during runtime which mp3 he wants to load from the internet. (unfortunately it looks like ControlP5's textfield cannot copy and paste...)

Or, even more extreme: writing a web-crawler which searches mp3s from a starting URL and doing strange things with the audio it finds. I can imagine this could be pretty cool.

As far as I know, this should work. Have a look at this example:  http://code.compartmental.net/minim/examples/AudioPlayer/PlayAURL/

Thank you ddifede,

The example works fine.

But my idea was to get the audio-information as a simple float-array, which works very easy with and AudioSample and a local file:

1. AudioSample as = minim.loadSample(someMusic.mp3);
2. float[] allTheSamplesAsFloats = as.getChannel(BufferedAudio.LEFT);

(as mentioned, this fails when the file is not local. It will just load a first "slice" from the audio. The size of the slice seem to depend on the actual mp3-encoding of the file, not on the internet connection speed or so.)

It does not look like that an AudioPlayer offers a method like this. (i guess it does not load the whole file at once)

I found out that you can load the file into a byte-array, store it locally with an ".mp3" ending and reload that file into an audio-sample. But this would not work in an Applet of course, and it is pedestrian somehow...

1. byte[] mp3Bytes = loadBytes("http://xyz.de/someMusic.mp3");
2. saveBytes("xxxxxxx.mp3", mp3Bytes);
3. AudioSample as = minim.loadSample("xxxxxxx.mp3");
4. float[] allTheSamplesAsFloats = as.getChannel(BufferedAudio.LEFT);

...

 The only thing I can imagine being a problem is that the app will probably hang until the loading is finished and it could be a while depending on how large the file is and how fast your download rate is. 

I think in general, if a file has to be loaded, there should be a try/catch block to handle if the file does not exist.
And: if the file is not local, there should be something like a "timeout": "How long shall i try to load the file?" - I implemented this once with two Threads, one is loading the file, the other one is interrupting the first one after a while. Don't know if this is a good solution of this problem, but it seems to work.

Ah, that's interesting, the loadBytes thing is a clever hack. I'll make a note to look into AudioSample having issues fully loading a URL.