Hello,
I have a site I built with iWeb '09 (http://www.Brantdavidwilliams.com) I recently tried to ad a song from iTunes. I am able to successfully drag the file over from the Media panel to my page but when I attempt to publish the site using the built in FTP client I keep getting an error message informing me that the FTP client is having trouble communicating with the server and to try again later or contact my server. It appears that the page does not upload to the server. However, when I go to the webpage online, in place of where the audio file and controls should be there is a logo for a quicktime file with a question mark over it. If I remove the audio file from the page in iWeb the site will once again publish without any problems. Any ideas? Thanks so much for your time!
Sincerely,
Brant

Hi Brant,

did you buy the song from the iTunes store? If so you're not allowed to publish it on your website and the file has the DRM (Digital Rights Management) which prevent you from publishing it to the web.

If you didn't buy it from the iTunes Store and didn't buy it as an album or whatever try to go to iTunes Preferences, General, Import Settings... , select MP3 Encoder, Select the song, go to Advanced and select "Create MP3 version". Once you have the MP3 version try again to put it into your site.

I guess it works with music you bought from the iTunes store too, after all DRM means nothing if you know how to work around it and maybe that's the way... I don't know... If you try please let me know the results...

Anyway keep in mind that you are not allowed to publish a song you bought from whatever store in whatever format on your website. The only music you can put on your website is yours or the one released under CC (Creative Common) license you find on Jamendo.com and other parts.

Regards,
Cédric

Hi Cédric,
Thanks so much for your quick reply. The song is one of my own so I know there's no DRM protection but I did convert it to an MP3 since iTunes had imported it using AAC. Still didn't work. I tried using FileZilla instead of the built in FTP and same thing, every file transferred successfully except the MP3. Under "reason" it just stated that "Could not start transfer"
So I'm not sure what that is about. Is it possible to just upload the mp3 to my server myself and then put a link to that file on one of my pages? What's the easiest way to do that? Thanks again!

That's strange...

http://iwebfaq.org/site/iWeb_Music.html

Chapter 1 should help you on getting the music file online

As a player I would recommend you to use Chapter 2.2 of the above page which is a Flash player so the music can be played on 99% of the computers. Otherwise you would use QuickTime but not all computers have QuickTime installed. I should definitely put an example of that player on the page for you to see how it looks... (update: I added the sample)

Greetings,
Cédric

Aha, worked like a charm. Thank you so much for your help! I really appreciate you taking the time to work with me!

I went ahead and used the simple flash player that you recommended. It looks nicer than the native player in iWeb anyway. I did discover that if you are using the HTML Snippet widget to paste the code then you have to keep the player ID's in both snippets set to "1". I have two players on the page and if I set the second player ID to "2" the song would not load.

Also, I did eventually get the page to publish correctly after dragging an audio file in from the Media pane as I had originally tried. I figured out that the problem was that the native FTP client was not automatically removing the spaces from the file name. It did automatically convert the file from m4a to mp3 but when it tried to load the file on the server with the spaces still in the file name the server rejected the file as improper. So if I manually took the spaces out of the filename in Finder, then the page would publish without a problem. But I decided to use your Flash solution anyway since I realized that even though I got the Apple version working, it was Quicktime based anyway. So thanks again!

Sincerely,
Brant

I'm glad it worked. Thank you very much for telling me why it didn't work putting the file into iWeb (spaces in the filename) I will try to keep that knowledge in mind to help people and provide it somewhere on the website. Thank you!