For a long time now our Clips player has enabled broadcasters & podcasters to play audio in a way that’s heard, in full quality, by you and all your guests. Now we’re introducing its cousin: the versatile Player.
The previous clips playback remains simple. It’s great for a wall of jingles and idents, which are usually very short so there’s no need for the clutter of detailed controls to forward, rewind etc.. The same goes for beds (that’s the background music during a show) for a different reason; they’re very much something you “fire and forget”.
But often you want to play back a single, longer piece of audio, such as edited highlights, clips from an interview or a package of voxes from the public.
The new Player gives just what you need, featuring:
- Display of playback time, and count down the time remaining
- A detailed and precise time slider for seeking, rewinding etc., great for touchscreen or keyboard control
- Volume control for the particular audio clip
- Enough space to display of the name of the audio
- Mono or stereo
It’s easy-to-use, too. Just press the Player button, and select your audio file.
It’s beta; we need your feedback
The player is beta right now; that means it’s a test and we might still change some of the details without notice. And the devil is in the details, especially for a tool you use in live production.
So that everyone gets the chance to try it and send in feedback, we’re making it available to everyone, including the free Cleanfeed for now. When it’s ready it’ll be exclusively for Cleanfeed Pro members.
It’s also beta because right now there’s no guide or docs in our knowledgebase yet; these will take shape as things become final. But we think you should find the experience very intuitive.
Accessibility
You may have heard some of the emphasis recently on accessibility for people with blind or low vision, including our rather enjoyable discussion at “The Podcaster’s Roundtable”. The new feature is no exception; we’ve tried to keep things simple & clean, in keeping with our scalable UI and functional with a screen reader.
The seek control behaves as a regular slider, with a super-responsive keyboard controls that benefits everyone, not just blind users. With focus on the seek control, try the following:
- Space bar to play/pause
- Left and right keys to step by 1 second
- Page up and page down to seek in larger steps
- Home button to return to the start
As is usual with accessibility, there are different tools and environments out there. If something isn’t working very well, most likely that’s not by design so help us understand by letting us know.
That’s the new Player, which is available in Cleanfeed now. It’s beta, and that means it might change based on feedback and suggestions from the community, so give it a try, and let us know what you think!