Wavestreaming SHOUTcast Pro Player Suite

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Looking for a way to play music on your website? Look no further, allow us to introduce you to the best HTML5 SHOUTcast player in the world; Wavestreaming.

The best HTML 5 SHOUTcast player in the world; Wavestreaming

The Wavestreaming SHOUTcast Pro Player Suite is a great SHOUTcast player; it primarily uses HTML5 and is extremely easy to use. It is iOS device capatitible, and you can embed the player directly into Facebook.

The interface of the Wavestreaming Pro Player Suite

The Pro Player Suite’s DJ interface is graphical and pleasing to the eye, which is important when you are sitting in front of the control panel all day while running your internet radio station; it features gradients and easy to read serif fonts. The fairly intuitively designed interface also makes it clear what track is playing, how long that track is, how long is left to go of the current track and what track is going to play after the current track. The interface is easily navigated if you are familiar with how to navigate other sites such as Twitter, Facebook etc. The design of the Wavestreaming Pro Player Suite is phenomenal, something that is not seen on any other SHOUTcast players. The player has some cool features built in such as real time song metadata (Artist name, song name and album art) updating which keeps the current song and album art updated if you are playing from digital music. This isn’t demonstrated here as Seduction Radio prefer to use white label records due to superior sound quality and clarity, and like myself they also enjoy the nostalgia associated with a piece of vinyl.

Changing the look of your player

The actual player box is highly customizable, you can create themes for your player with picture backgrounds and solid colours. Making your own themes for your Wavestreaming player requires no knowledge of HTML, Flash or CSS; instead you only need to have access to the internet. The process is simple, there are boxes where you can enter the HEX code of the colour you want or if you click on the box a visual editor pops up where you can choose the colour you want. When you are dragging the circle around to select the colour you want there is a small bug where the page highlights in different parts, although annoying it’s no big deal and doesn’t affect the use of the player. On other websites that have a colour selector it often uses Flash, but on Wavesteaming it doesn’t so it can be used on devices which don’t support Flash, like the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

Wavestreaming SHOUTcast Pro Player Suite 1

 

You can also set images as the background which is fabulous and infinitely useful, doing this is as simple as it is to set the background as a colour; you image simply click the ‘upload’ button, this will bring up a box which displays your filesystem. From there you just find the image you want to use and double click on it or click ‘open’ and the image will be uploaded, it is worth noting that the image can not be over 1 megabyte. There are also hundreds of professionally designed themes that you can use if you don’t want to create your own using the intuitive theme creator. Along with colours you can also toggle whether or not to display the volume and pop out options.

This is what I got a player looking like in just 10 minutes:

Wavestreaming SHOUTcast Pro Player Suite 2

 

 Wavestreaming in action

As you can see from the screenshot, this is a current client of mine (Seduction Radio) as my days of internet radio are long over. I was originally coding a solution for an internet radio station that utilised Flash, but of course iOS devices don’t run Flash and rewriting the entire application in HTML 5 would have been very time consuming and unnecessary because of the brilliant Wavestreaming.

The Seduction Radio Wavestreaming Player

Getting the Wavestreaming player onto your website

 

Wavestreaming SHOUTcast Pro Player Suite 3

To get your Wavestreaming player onto your site you simply copy and paste the code of the customised player into your website’s source and you’re done, which took me 3 minutes including the time of unlocking my 1Password, logging into the Wavepanel, getting the source and then logging into the site I was embedding the player on and putting in the source. It couldn’t be more simple.
Not having the source code on the Seduction Radio hosting did raise some questions between us all; we were wondering if there would be any issues with downtime as the player was embedded in an iFrame. Though, to our surprise we only counted one outage of the service, and that was for 30 minutes due to the implementation of a new secure certificate which involved changing the IP address of a server. This downtime was handled professionally and Wavestreaming apologised fully for the outage on their blog. We’ve been using the Wavestreaming SHOUTcast Pro Player for almost a month now and have loved every minute out it, we especially love the stability and reliability of the service.

Cross-Platform Availability & Wavestreaming

Wavestreaming supports all of the main browsers, which are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera. It is an HTML 5 solution which means that the player will work on all iOS devices where Flash is not supported, this is something that more or less every other SHOUTcast player lacks and this is one of the main features which makes Wavestreaming the best player. HTML 5 is the default option but on devices and browsers that are stuck behind the times and don’t support HTML 5 the Wavestreaming player will render in Adobe Flash which means that it will render on more or less all browsers and devices. The loading times are very fast on iOS devices, we tested on an iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4s and the iPad 2 over 3G and WiFi and they all rendered the player within a few seconds. You can have multiple players on the same account with Wavestreaming, and they can all have different custom themes or you can have several players with the same custom theme that you painstakingly put together. The Wavestreaming player automatically updates without refreshing the page which is very convenient.

Facebook integration with Wavestreaming

Facebook is a phenomena that has taken entertainment into a whole new world, with so many internet radio stations around these days getting listens from Facebook can be difficult not to mention frustrating; but Wavestreaming just upped the game. With Wavestreaming you can add your SHOUTcast player directly to your Facebook page, not requiring listeners to go through the outdated process of clicking through to your site. Because you can add your player to Facebook it means that your station can go viral, using the powerful built in sharing options letting users share the player to their wall and put it on other users’ walls. You can also embed the ‘Share on Facebook’ button on your site so from your site fans can share your radio station to their friends.

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Pricing and summery

A single year’s subscription to Wavestreaming costs $99, but a lifetime account costs $297 which is a much better deal being the price of only three years of yearly $99 subscriptions.
We love the Wavestreaming SHOUTcast Pro Player Suite, here is what we love the most;
  • Easy to use interface
  • Simple navigation
  • The HTML 5
  • Its intelligent switching between HTML 5 and Adobe Flash when HTML 5 isn’t supported
  • Fast load times
  • Cheap pricing
  • Facebook integration
  • Friendly customer support

And that’s just the main features, there are many small little touches that make this a must have if you run a radio station. You can watch the Wavestreaming Pro Player Suite videos and purchase a subscription to this great service here.

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Chrisselle Douglas
12 years ago

I’m still amazed by how quickly HTML 5 replaced Flash. Some people said it was going to be at least another five years before people would even consider switching over. It works so much better than Flash and I love how slick the Wavestreaming player is!

Hammy Havoc
Hammy Havoc
12 years ago

Agreed. I love how it is less bandwidth intensive and doesn’t crash every few minutes as well. Proprietary software is diabolical. Open standards like HTML5 are wonderful.

Craig Lackie
12 years ago
Reply to  Hammy Havoc

HTML 5 is great and I love it a whole bunch. It seems the only people that don’t like it is people using browsers that don’t support it.

Hammy Havoc
Hammy Havoc
12 years ago
Reply to  Craig Lackie

Either that or they work at Adobe. The development of Flash for mobile devices ending is a real sign of the times for Adobe.

Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell
12 years ago

Pretty awesome player to be honest! Very fast, responsive and so customisable its unreal! Great review.

bummerbit
bummerbit
12 years ago
Reply to  Dave Mitchell

cant get it to work in wordpress.. :/

Hammy Havoc
Hammy Havoc
12 years ago
Reply to  bummerbit

You probably need to download a plugin to allow the usage of code within posts or use an HTML widget.

kai
kai
12 years ago

Is this the only player reviewed? Do other services offering HTML 5 players of this nature exist?

Not to be rude but the article sounds like an ad as no alternatives are mentioned. $99 a year is far from the open source-y-ness of something like jPlayer combined with say the cheaper Get Marci for current now playing information and a free iFrame app on your station’s Facebook page.

But for the rest of us that don’t know how to code jPlayer onto a site I would be interested to hear about other (cheaper) HTML 5 products like this.

DJ Jean Mercier
DJ Jean Mercier
11 years ago

I’m using Wavestreaming for my DJ Radio and I must say i”m very impress with the cloud DJ software wow!!!! Wavestreaming is on the top right now

Miracle L. Smith
Miracle L. Smith
11 years ago

I called WaveStreaming on 3 different occasions before signing up for their services. They never answered the telephone and never returned my call. I was a prospective customer at the time. After some research it seemed that WS was the best way for me to go. I reluctantly signed up. HUGE MISTAKE. I spent 5 hours trying to get the service to work. Never could. I wrote and asked for assistance. They never responded. That is until I requested that my service be canceled. They downplayed my issues and told me to contact them during business hours. It has been several days and no one will respond to me about my request to cancel the service. Beware. Wavestreaming does not care about its customers. They will take your money and ignore you. Choose another service.

BouncerDan
BouncerDan
11 years ago

After Paying for the lifetime package 18 months ago I have just been told by Wavestreaming that they are limiting each account to 15 players. This was NEVER mentioned in any of the sales info I received prior to buying the lifetime account.

One day they said they were checking accounts an found people were reselling an had 50 accounts. So they restricted every account to 15. I would have never shelled out the cash if I had known they would do this 18 months after I paid.

Other than that the product does what it says but the limitation on the amount of players you can make do not justify $297 ($19.80 per player Lifetime/ $6.60 yearly)

Hammy Havoc
Hammy Havoc
11 years ago
Reply to  BouncerDan

Do you have fifteen different streams? I’ll be the first to admit it is a bit of a letdown being limited on something you’ve paid for lifetime usage of, but fifteen different streams is a huge number; You can still embed each player in as many places as you like.

Unfortunately this is how big business frequently works; The honest majority suffer because of the actions of a handful of people. Look at Pro Tools; An iLok in 2013? It just seems archaic, give me cloud based licensing systems any day, especially with the cost of a license.

They’re somewhat of a niche player, although the cost may seem high, there’s nothing else that comes close, or at least there wasn’t at the time of publishing this review.

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