Multiple Click-to-play Audio Clips on a Page - Recommendations?

[Makosuke]

I'm working on adding some audio samples to some online language lessons. How I want it to function is pretty straightforward: At the end of each line of foreign text the'll be a little "play" button of some sort, and clicking on it plays the audio file in question.

I know there are a dozen different ways to do this, but what I'm wondering is, what y'all think is the *best* way. My first draft is using the method laid out on this page, basically an Object tag wrapped around an embed tag with the size set just big enough to allow the QuickTime (or WMP) "play" button, 16x17 pixels in the former.

That looks fine, plays fine with QT, but has two issues:

One (major), if QT isn't installed IE resorts to WMP, but since later versions apparently respect the dimensions of the EMBED tag, the controller is too small to see the play button (curse WMP's gigantic interface!).

Two (minor), this method preloads everything with the page. This is nice from an "insta-play" standpoint, but may bog down modem users and will also hammer on the server pretty hard if the site gets popular for some bizarre reason (~20K clips X ~15 clips per page = 300K/page, which'll add up quick with multiple pages per lesson).

So is this the best I'm going to do? Is there a trickier, more compatible way to do it? Should I just require QuickTime and be done with it (that'd also let me improve quality a bit by going with AAC instead of MP3, which is tempting)? Should I go with a bunch of QT streaming files, or is that silly for 3-second sound clips?

Thoughts?

 

[rozwell]

flash is very powerful and robust. just about every computer on the internet has flash player of some sort and a simple audio piece could be done in a very early version of flash to ensure everyone can use it.

 

[Makosuke]

Flash is certainly an option, but it wasn't high on the list of what I wanted to consider on account of basically having to embed 20 tiny Flash files for basic audio that can be handled quite well by dedicated media players. (That, and Flash ads have gotten so infuriating recently that even I'm starting to recommend turning off embedded Flash.)

Just seems like an added step that shouldn't be necessary, but perhaps it's the smoothest way to handle this (and does allow me to skip pre-loading, I believe).

Other suggestions? Anybody?