A customer asked me to install an MP3 player into their WordPress blog. I searched the WP Plugins directory for "mp3 player" and found several that either had too many features or required you to jump through hoops to get an audio file into place. Many required use of manually constructed [tags] to insert the player into a page. [READ MORE...]
Looking for MP3's? Look no further than Project Playlist, (http://www.playlist.com/).
The site, which bills itself as a "social music experiment" and music search engine, is all that and more.
Using the social media / social networking model, the site allows you to build a playlist of tracks from it's vast collection of audio links and assembles them into a freindly, easy to use flash based media player.
You can log in to PlayList.com and add new tracks, re-arrange what you've already got, send email invites to friends, and share your playlist with others.
Although Volusion is decent software, there are a few complaints I hear from customers, and one is the cost. Volusion's pricing is based on number of individual product codes in a store's database, (see chart below).
In addition to the monthly fees, there is an initial setup fee... and then you have the typical merchant account fees you'd pay no matter which ecommerce software you use, (even if you use "free" software, you still pay transaction fees, discount rate and statement fees when you make a sale -- that is a "given" cost of online sales).
The pricing is all explained, and there are no hidden costs -- but on large sites that have a lot of image files, videos, or other media that uses a lot of bandwidth, you can get a surprise bill from Volusion for excess bandwidth, (yes, they tell you about it when you sign up, but most people never do the math or consider how much bandwidth modern websites actually use).
A month or two of these bills, and you start thinking of ways to cut down on costs. While some stores can either reduce the number of images, or make them physically smaller, (in pixels), or apply greater .JPG compression to reduce the file sizes, at some point you start thinking there has to be a better way.
There is...