Forum Moderators: phranque

Message Too Old, No Replies

Putting Site On CD, Making It Executable And Faster Downloading

         

stephenc

1:34 pm on Oct 26, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I'm designing a site for a friend at <bleep!> The site is to promote a band and on the 'samples' page I've put links to 8 of the songs which the band play. The problem is that -

1 It takes too long to download a song,

2 I want to put the site onto a CD that he can hand out around the clubs, pubs, etc. Ideally, I'd like the CD to run automatically and open at the 'home page'.

I'd really appreciate any advice in getting around these two problems

Stephen

[edited by: rcjordan at 2:36 pm (utc) on Oct. 26, 2003]
[edit reason] sorry, no specifics, please. see TOS [/edit]

curlykarl

2:31 pm on Oct 26, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hi

A good tutorial on how to add a site to a CD can be found at :

h*tp://www.dreamweaver-extensions.com/

You will also need to remove your URL from the post as it is against the T.O.S

[webmasterworld.com...]

Karl :)

richardb

8:40 pm on Oct 26, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



No offense but would Joe P want to look at at an offline web site?

Sure stick the tracks on CD, DVD posssibly with a splash page and a link to the site...

HTH

Rich

stephenc

7:07 pm on Oct 27, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I know what you mean Richard, but before I put the site up for him, he was already handing out sample CD's with only the 8 tracks on them - nothing else!

There was no contact details, history, photos or anything. At least with the site written to CD, he can hand out the CD's and get a full picture (no pun intended) of the band.

With the mp3's around 4MB each the download time on a dial up in prohibitive. I wonder if its possible to resample the mp3 files and make them smaller with an acceptable loss of quality?

Any suggestion appreciated

Stephen

txbakers

8:01 pm on Oct 27, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



There is a nifty program called "IIS Emulator" put out by Buyonica.com which I'm experimenting with. It will allow HTML to be run off of the CD.

richardb

8:15 pm on Oct 27, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Stephen Ok I get where you are coming from, a rear guard action.

No probs you are definitely going the right way with offline content I'd be tempted to go full 44k, let's face it mp3 well they are great on line but... You have got the "space to include video + the site, I'm assuming that it's a good site, if not strip it down to basics, if you’ve got time turn it into a full blown multimedia concept, it will look great, sound great and everyone will love you ;0

Use a mixed format for the CD then audio only is OK or anyone on a PC can see he lot.

Rich

Mark_A

8:17 pm on Oct 27, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



[google.com...]

for the various solution to getting a CD to autorun on entry into the CD drive.

You could try to package browsers on the CD or assume that the user will usually have a browser on their machine.

Question option is to whether you need to make an entry page graphic .. or icon file .. there is an autorun confiiguration which will startup fire the browser to open the index page of the site but my last attempt using that did not autorun on all machine configurations requiring as it does an exe file to be run.

Anyhow lots of options on the search list. Do you assume tha all your users will have the audio devices needed to hear the tracks?

hth

stephenc

3:47 pm on Oct 28, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



txbakers suggested a 'nifty program called "IIS Emulator" put out by Buyonica.com which I'm experimenting with. It will allow HTML to be run off of the CD.' I'm not sure if I'm reading you right, but surely any PC with an installed browser will read HTML from a hard drive or CD? Have I picked you up wrong?

In an earlier post in this thread, curlykarl pointed me to h*tp://www.dreamweaver-extensions.com/ After some time playing about with it I got it to run fine. Maybe Mark_A might like to have a look at this as he was having some problems with it or a similar prog. when he tried it last. It works find on WinXP with IE6 and Win ME but I havnt got to test it on other browsers. It has its own splash page which you can edit and add styles to it, but I think it would be a great idea to put, eg, a large Flash file on it.

The problem still exists though, of how to reduce the size of the mp3 files on the net. Does anyone know how to reduce the size of them without cutting their length? Presently a dialup takes about 20 mins to download just one song - about 19 mins too much!

Stephen

richardb

4:11 pm on Oct 28, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



>>Does anyone know how to reduce the size of them without cutting their length?

You've run into the thorny quality V size issue

MP3 bit rate can be dropped as far as 8 bit (sounds yuk), so it's down to what is acceptable for both parties

Convert stereo to mono, for a smaller file size


Another op[tion might be to provide a very small demo and then an option to download the whole thing.

Rich

BaseVinyl

4:11 pm on Oct 28, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Why not just make the existing mp3's streamable on the website so someone clicks on the link and the music starts streaming right away (well sort of right away)...I think that's alot faster than downloading the whole mp3 and then playing it. Our mp3's are the same size as yours and when the link is clicked a media player pops open and the song starts pretty much tout suite.

stephenc

4:26 pm on Oct 28, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Changing from stereo to mono might not be a good idea. A small demo with a link to the full version sounds better, but making it streamable might be the solution.

Can you tell me how to do that please?

Stephen

BaseVinyl

4:34 pm on Oct 28, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



stephenc...i just sent you a stickymail with the details

:)