RIP Yahoo Web / Media Player

LAST AND FINAL UPDATE OF THIS EVER-EVOLVING POST! June 25, 2015

I’ve been meaning to say – beloved WordPress open-source geniuses have solved this whole issue and you don’t need a plugin or anything else to manage audio streams and downloads and playlists anymore, just WordPress. This has been true for a while now I just now finally got around to updating ye olde “Yahoo Player Lament” post =). Done. Closed. Le fin. Or as Jonathan Richman said, bye bye, bye bye. I’ll leave the rest of it and the comments below for posterity as it was such a lively thread for those of us who care madly about this stuff.

LADEEEEZ AND GENTLEMEN! Musicians and bloggers, audio web geeks and music lovers of every stripe the world over, we have an UPDATE! 10-2-2014 :->

It’s not: an update for the dearly departed Yahoo Web Player. It’s not: a solution for streaming video. It’s not: a solution for platforms other than WordPress. It is: a badass new WordPress plugin for audio streaming that works on (praise all that is holy) all major platforms including iOS, Android, etc. I am testing out the free version here. Pro version purchase imminent, as it allows for multiple playlists, drag and drop ordering of songs and other features which will be essential for the “power-user.” Wanted to make sure it hums along and works as intended and so far yes yes yes it does.

I will leave this thread open for further improvements, revelations, or laments about our old pal YMP / YWP. But I’m pretty sure the audio-player wp-plugin question has been finally solved by something solid, cross-platform, stable, and easy to use. Get the plugin here.

UPDATE 2-22-2014! Thanks Jaap for the Playlist function update! Awesome work, it’s great to see that part working again. Thanks everyone for your kind feedback and notes. Glad to see so much interest in this. Please feel free to post any links to your uses of the player, or blog posts about this subject, in the thread below.

UPDATE 1-28-2014! Scroll down to the more recent comments or click here for the latest exciting updates around this.

UPDATE 8-30-2013! OK, to summarize from the comment thread, what we’ve found is that you can host your own instance of the player and modify it to fit your needs. You can download it from here. This is unfortunately not a solution for bloggers who use shared servers and can’t install and run the software locally. What yahoo had going was a neat little snippet of code that activated the player from any domain, and served it up from Yahoo’s servers. The good news is if you can install it, it runs exactly the same way as the remotely served version used to. We have it running again on publicdomain4u.com and it seems to work perfectly. For those going this route: it’s important to note that you need to poke through the player code and make sure that all of the elements are served locally. There still are some images and bits that come off Yahoo servers, and given that they’re not supporting this software anymore, it’s a safe bet those elements will go dark sooner or later. It’s a hell of a piece, as others have stated here, it’s the best web media player out there, ESPECIALLY for music, by a country mile.

Big props to our server admin and chief propeller-hat, Lou Parmelee at Planet Six String for getting the player humming for us again!

UPDATE 8-20-2013! See encouraging developments in the comments below, and feel free to join in the discussion.

UPDATE 8-14-2013! It’s gone again. Bye bye. Yahoo Media Player, or Yahoo Web Player, or whatever it was called. How sad, that was the coolest thing Yahoo ever made.

UPDATE 7-8-2013! It’s on, the Yahoo Web Player is not discontinued, turns out that report was erroneous. You just need to change the URL to access it. View the very simple fix, right here. Truly happy news.

ORIGINAL POST:

Ack! Yahoo turned off their WebPlayer service. What a bummer for all the sites out there that used it. I used it extensively in PublicDomain4U, various other music blogs, and the band sites I manage. I know of roughly a bazillion other music sites that also used it. This was a simple way to make all your .mp3 or other media types load automatically in a neat little player – just by adding a line or two of code to your head tag.

I had wondered how Yahoo benefited from this magnanimous service to the Webmasters of the world. I had wondered what their expense in tech resources and cash amounted to, for making it available. If anyone knows of a media player that works similarly to the late, great, Yahoo WebPlayer, please leave it, or your #$%^&’s and laments about this, in the comments below.

For now, without any explanation or discussion, webplayer.yahoo.com redirects to the front page of Yahoo. I did find one article, on webpronews, which explains that Yahoo is shutting down a stack of services including the redundant AltaVista search engine. That’s understandable. But the Yahoo WebPlayer was a great service, and it will be sorely missed by myself and everyone else who wove it into the fabric of their websites.

Author: Eric Din

Eric makes songs, records, websites, and little forts for cats to play in. Founder/lifer in The UpTones, guitarist, songwriter, and music curator, Eric blogs at ericdin.com except when he doesn't.

123 thoughts on “RIP Yahoo Web / Media Player”

  4. Freakin CHRISTMAS!! Thanks Angelo, that is superb news. I just tested on the Uptones site, fires right up, and I will now replace the url in my other sites.

  5. Looks like Christmas is over already. The replacement code stopped working after about a week on my sites.

    Sooo disappointing. It would have taken Yahoo almost no time or effort to keep supporting this code, so I really don’t understand why they would kill it off when it was so good and so helpful to so many people!

  6. Chris, you might try this very improbable fix: delete the code from your site. Clear any server-side cache. And then replace the code. I did that, on two sites where the Player had died, and miraculously, it fixed the problem. I fully expect this will die at some point, unless Yahoo decides otherwise. But give that a try and you might find it works again, for now. Please let me know how that works or not, for you! Thanks

  7. No luck I’m afraid. I don’t know how to clear my server-side cache (I’m using Godaddy’s Web Builder which is pretty crap) but I did remove all the code, re-publish the site and then add the code again.

    The web player disappeared from both of my sites simultaneously on around August 10.

  8. Bummer. Well thanks for the 411, Chris. Just checked my sites, and sure enough, it’s gone. Again! Woe is me.

  10. Una verdadera pena que haya desaparecido el Media Player de Yahoo. De momento no hay ninguna alternativa.

    Hace años que lo utilizo y estoy indignada con su retirada.

    Un saludo desde Barcelona España.

  11. Oh my… I was not expecting this to happen, I have been running a dedicated music blog for years with this awesome classy player! The best thing yahoo ever developed, the most usefull for sure. I can’t believe it! I haven’t found a decent replacement yet! Help!

  12. Can anyone tell me that’s not real please!!! I can’t reproduce my music on my blog from 2 days ago! there’s any solution to this?

  13. Yahoo removed the script again and haven’t replace yet. I hope they are planning to replace it or else, we need to find new player, but unfortunately, no player can play like yahoo webplayer.

  14. Does anyone have a replacement mp3 player that finds all of the mp3s listed on the page like Yahoo did? That was the best feature of the Yahoo media player.

  16. Two years ago I found this web http://www.kiwi6.com to upload and save my music on the cloud!! But today I was looking another player to replaced YWP, but exploring deeplier I found that kiwi has the opcion to get the code for the playlist you make. Even you can put in autostart mode. It’s not like the YWP but it’ can be useful. IF YOU don’t know how to use it make me notice I can help you guys!! http://www.aldolozano.blogspot.com or find me on FB as Aldo Lozano

  17. Thanks Aldo, will check that out! Do you mean you can re-use their player code? Is it open source?

  18. So, I listen to a music blog (etmusiquepourtous.com) and their yahoo webplayer is back up and working again. Not sure how that is possible, but does anyone know how this is possible? I’d love to keep it active on my own blog…

  20. Wow, thanks, interesting, it looks like they have the js code from the player running locally in their server.

  21. Thanks sibo! Very much appreciated, and I am glad to see others are working on this! Cheers

  22. Thanks all for the discussion – good to see some solutions emerging!! I moved this post back to the front page here since it’s gotten interesting. (liking the music on those blogs linked in comments above, too!)

  23. For the win! That works beautifully. I’ll update this post tomorrow with a how-to. Thanks so much for this tip, Listener. Solved!

  25. This looks like a perfect solution for me personally, but I can’t seem to get it to work. My site’s powered by tumblr with a custom URL (http://thecitizeninsane.com) — I followed your instructions the best I could, but still nothing.

    Any way you could help me out??

  28. Hi teej, damn, I think you’d need to actually install and run the player software locally. Probably wont be able to do that in a shared server type thing, unless the server admin is willing. I downloaded the player software, and our admin genius was able to install it and it fired right up. I will update the post above once I’ve got this a little more sorted. But if you want to try this, go to etmusiquepourtous.com, view the HTML source, find the player .js file and download it.

  29. After a bit more research, it looks like the website I previously referenced may have taken the Yahoo! player and tweaked it for their own needs because it is not accessing the javascript from Yahoo! but is instead accessing it from their own website. I wish I were tech-savvy enough to do that myself. The reason I loved the player so much was because it allowed me to link YouTube videos on my blog and you could create a playlist from a set of links. Bummer that the ability to do that for free seems to have gone the way of the dodo.

  30. Do tell! We got it working with help from my server admin genius Lou Parmelee. More on that and a linky to follow once we work out a few kinks. As I mentioned in another comment – this is a locally hosted solution – not a web based one like Yahoo used to provide. You’d need to install the player and run it on your own server (or get yr server admin to do that). more soon

  31. ‘Fraid so, yep. Maybe someone will re-host the centralized player like yahoo used to do, but for now, seems the only way to get it running is to install the .js and run it locally on your own server. Of course not everyone (not most music bloggers) can really do that. Maybe WordPress.com and some of the other major blog platforms will add the player as a service for their users? Remains to be seen.

  32. I’ll provide the javascript code divided into three, and make a tutorial for you on how to use it on your own server. 🙂

  35. Bloody well done, Joe. Most excellent. I’ll publish ours here soon as it’s ready. Local hosted version works great.

  36. Ah, I didn’t realize at first that a major use of Yahoo Web Player was for bloggers who couldn’t install their own media players locally…

    So I modified my previous solution by hosting all of the files on Google Drive. Now you can install my solution on any website by adding three lines of HTML code! (no need to upload any files to your server) The updated demo is still at http://www.pitchforkpal.com/bootiemashup

  37. I was able to get it to work using the js from etmusiquepourtous.com too. However, I’m not sure if they’re actually hosting all the png files and other graphics used by Yahoo! to make the player. To fully self-host, all calls to Yahoo! in the scripts will need to be replaced. In the meanime, it’s nice having the player working again (short lived as that might be).

  38. Exactly. Need to re-host the images locally but apart from that it appears to be a stand-alone, fully functional piece if you can run it on your own server.

  39. OK, got it! (at least I think I have). Went through the js and recreated the directories on my server to match, then uploaded all the graphics. I know there’s still some outbound URLs to Yahoo! that might wind up being a problem in the future, but it looks like most of those are not specific to the player (like calls to Rails). Who knows when/or if Yahoo! will delete the directories (or move them to a new location) in which case, lots of luck. So if you’re interested in self-hosting the player, now’s the time.

  43. Great stuff..

    not sure where to find the pictures … could you post a quick tutorial + the js? 🙂

  44. This is definitely a luddite solution–and I plan on playing with sibo’s solution posted above this weekend–but it’s been working for me thus far…

    I just through this before

    It’s running on my site, no problemo. For what I can glean, this is temporary in and of itself, but still…

  45. Yeah, this is awesome!

    I haven’t been able to toy with it yet, but I’m stoked to give this a try. It looks to be ideal, for me anyways.

    BIG THANKS sibo!

  48. Looking forward to a professional programmer’s self-hosted build of this (Lou Parmelee?). My hack works for now, but I’m suspicious that it’s still calling to Yahoo! in ways that I’m not seeing and will go “poof” once they pull the plug for good.

  49. Yep, you basically need to pick through it, and re-host any images or other items so it’s all in your local machine. We’re still messing with it but working well so far. Will update furreals once it’s soup yet 🙂

  50. Thanks Eric, glad to hear you’re still on it! I spent a few hours going through the code yesterday, impressive to say the least. No idea how much Yahoo! spent on it’s development, but I can’t imagine WebPlayer was cheap. Amazing that they’d just up and scrap it as they did, but apparently that’s the way big tech companies behave sometimes, unfortunately. Thanks again!

  51. Bingo! Just solved one of the main headaches I’d been running into, what mystery file lay behind this line?

    YMPParams[“assetsroot”] = YMPParams[“assetsroot”] || “http://l.yimg.com/pb/webplayer” + “/” + “0.9.39”;

    Here it is!

    /webplayer/0.9.39/flash/flashsound.swf

  52. This is good news!! What is the current status of this “Yahoo Media/Web Player” replacement?

  54. you mentioned that you have the yahoo webplayer installed on publicdomain4u.com, how can I get all these files to install on my web server? Do you have a download link?

    Thanks!

  56. Hi Ron, I am pretty sure http://l.yimg.com/pb/webplayer/0.9.39/js/player-min.js is the most recent YWP source code. If you can install that, then you just add the invocation code to your header (just like the old yahoo code snippet, but change the url to call the player .js from your own domain) and it should work. As I’ve mentioned though, it’s probably a good idea to go though and re-host all of the images, CSS and anything else, on your own server, in case those pieces disappear from Yahoo’s servers. Hope that helps! We’re still messing with our version, but if you want to look at it for comparison to see what we’ve done so far, feel free to DL http://publicdomain4u.com/_scripts/yahoo-webplayer.js Cheers, Eric

  58. “…what we’ve found is that you can host your own instance of the player and modify it to fit your needs. You can download it from here. “

    OK, I dl’ed the .js code. Could someone pls tell me how to make it work? (Sorry, I’m not a bona fide geek.)

  59. Hi Dave, basically it’s two steps:

    1.Upload that file to your server

    This assumes you have admin control of your webserver. If not, then you’d need to get your server admin to install the .js script.

    2.Put this in your page’s HTML head, or just before the body tag:

    script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://yoursite.com/_scripts/yahoo-webplayer.js”> (close script tag)

    (I removed the open and closing tags in the example above, because WP is stripping script code from comments. Just be sure and add those in when you put it in your site and it should work.)

    As for modifying the code – I’m hoping someone publishes a 100% self-hosted version of the script. Maybe we will once we’re done going through it.

    If you want to try using our (not completely done!) edited version of the script, as your starting point, instead of starting with YMP’s last version, feel free to DL it from here.

    That’s about as far as we’ve gotten! Thanks for the Q’s and info everyone. Will add to this discussion if/when I learn more.

  62. Eric, thanks a million. Our music blog has really suffered over the last while in light of yahoo pulling the player. We’ve started using your js above and it immediately brought a tear to my eye. Big love to you and all on this thread for pushing the boundaries and getting this back in our lives.

  65. Hi Joe, wondering if you would be able to do the same for me? I’ve had this setup on a website for a friend who’s a musician and now it’s not working. Would love to get this up again for them!

  67. Thanks Otmar! Glad that worked out for you. I could never have done it without Lou’s help, and I give credit where it’s due.

  68. Cool! So glad that worked out for you too, Rico. Seems to work great as a self-hosted script. Be sure and replace the images and stuff is my advice – as the items served from yahoo servers may be yanked at any time.

  72. Well that’s the tricky part. You actually need to go through the player .js code, find any files that are hosted on yahoo’s servers, download them, and re-host them locally on your own server. then replace the /path code to the file in the .js. Loads of fun. But not as scary as it sounds.

    If anyone has any new examples they can publish or any further light to shed on this, please plop it in a comment here. Thanks everyone for the helpful insights and updates!

  73. PS. or alternately you can leave it as-is, but then the minute yahoo stops hosting those files or changes their location or whatever, it will bonk.

  74. Yay! Thanks so much for the kind words and happy news Edie 🙂
    Yes, when I first made my “R.I.P” post I was truly mourning!
    LOLing now but damn, that is one sweet little piece of software
    and honestly I don’t think music blogs and musicians’ sites Etc.
    can be half as cool without it. Let the music plaaaaay!! Rockin’
    your playlist now, ah, smoooth funky jamz. Nice! Cheers,
    Eric

  75. Isn’t that the TRUTH Eric!!!! Woooo!!!! I was too through when they did that and suffered the ultimate Welp in the jaw when they pulled the little ‘newer’ script with ‘player-beta’ in it. Remember EasyListener? Yahoo had pulled that too and I was looking CRAZY! In desperation I took a chance and sent an email to William White … one of the developers. He is thee NICEST Man!!!!! He turned me on to heaven… check him out! http://musiclibre.org/ What a veritable paradise!!! That little player scans the page for mp3s and plays them. I was using that first before I discovered YMP. Brilliance! I become a babbling idiot if either are disturbed. LOL!!!! You can see the Easylistener Player buttons on my Blogger here: I have alot of music and stream it with these masterpieces of technology. Nothing better—anywhere! (As you know). I had SO much fun ready your blog last night. My hope was restored and then when I finally saw my buttons and player I went………………CRAZY with delight. Bless your heart!!!!!!!! *clapping thunderously*!!!! Hugs and Love!!!

    Edie … E.FM ( http://msoldschool.ning.com)

  77. Hey Y’all, I just found this trying to fix my video playlist. I’m having a hard time figuring out how to make it work cause I did every single thing as I should but still not working. I know I have to be doing smthing wrong but don’t know what it is. I download the file, uploaded the script to my web, then copy pasted and redirected the path to my web and still doesn’t work, am I missing something here? the only thing I can think of that could prob me giving me this issue is the downloaded script, am I supposed to change something in it?

  81. We’re still trying to figure out how to access and re-host the CSS elements. Anyone have a handle on that?

    There are some tips in this article:

    http://www.ponticstar.com/blog/2009/12/12/hacking-yahoo-media-player/

    which worked for the old yahoo-hosted player, but the visual modifications (player color etc.) don’t work in this new local-hosted adventure.

    Any light on that would be greatly appreciated! Once this is all fully sorted, I’ll add an update to the main article above and give credit where all it is due.

    Many thanks for all the good feedback, everyone.

    Eric

  82. I noticed that the xspf code won’t work anymore too Eric. Remember how you could href a xspf and it would load the little play button next to the Title and play the whole playlist? Not anymore. I got it to work but had to put all of the mp3s inside the document. So not my cup of tea. I ‘play by ear’ so to speak and it just seems like way too much work. The “playthispage” won’t work anymore. Can anyone lend a suggestion? Sorry if this is confusing.

  86. I’m fairly knowlegable in web design, but for the life of me I can’t seem to get this hack to work. I uploaded the player.js file to my server, but no matter where I place the code in my site, I can’t get it to work. Any help/walk throughs on this?

  88. Dear Eric

    Unfortunately I was not successful to get the yahooplayer working anymore. But I was successful by using the link to the js-file on your site. Is this ok for you? Or would it be an option to provide the js-file per mail tp me?

    I am hosting websites for opera singers, which are non-profit based and it would be of great help.

    Thank you and best regards

    Detlef Kurth/Berlin

  89. Hi Edie, sorry I missed this. I haven’t used that function so was not aware of that issue. Thanks for the headsup on that. We’re still messing with this. Hope to have something good to report soon!

  92. man i feel like such a noob..so i have some clients sites that we designed that are responsive technology sites..i loved the ywp for video..but i just realized it was down (i must have looked our from the rock i was under) and found these posts..i cannot for the life of me get it to work..what is the js file/script i need to upload on to the server? and where, just the root folder? or the js folder? please help..thanks. all the responses here let me know i not the only one.

  93. Hi Faceless Tech! Thanks for the note. I sent you an email. Will post something more here update the main post soon.

  95. Hi

    if you have – could you supply more files such as images/css of the player?

    collect to a bundle

    would be nice

  96. Hi Michal, some of the images and CSS are embedded in the .js code. I hope to post something helpful about all this soon.
    Thanks and cheers all for your interest in this, I had a feeling I was not the only one lamenting the loss of this elegant and smart player. Please do continue to share any successful installs or mod’s you may have managed, plus links to their uses, if you like! Thanks.

  99. Thanks Eric! I’ve been trying to fool around with it to no avail. Whatever made the little button show next to the xspf is no longer working and it’s driving me nuts! LOL! Well, quasi-nuts. I wish I could figure it out.

  100. Hi everyone !

    I have a Blogger blog & that’s a pity Yahoo stopped its media player.

    I made the same: I am Using Your “http://publicdomain4u.com/_scripts/yahoo-webplayer.js” Player.

    Thank you very much !

  102. Alright! We have a good working player now, that I’d like to share with those of you whom are interested. I’m not updating the main post above yet, just want to give this to some of you who have commented here first, and see how it all works. Please write me directly thru my contact page -> http://ericdin.com/contact-me/ and I’ll send you a code snippet and fill you in on what we’re doing with this. Thanks and cheers, Eric

  104. Hi Jaap,
    Are you still using your own locally hosted version?
    Or are you using the code snippet I emailed you recently?

  105. I haven’t tried to use the playlist function myself, but I saw another note that also said that feature isn’t working. Maybe someone can figure that part out?

  106. Hi Eric,

    I use the link to opensourcemusic that you mailed me, but also hosted that same code locally – no differences so far. Working great for mp3’s.

    I’m trying to figure out the XSPF-playlist parsing. Found the 2 relevant lines of code (out of the 25.000 lines of code… thanks to firebug I am making progress). The trick must be to write a little php to JSONify the playlist…

    I’m just an amateur but as soon as I found some sort of solution I’ll post it.

  107. Hi Jaap,

    That sounds good to me! Thanks for the link! What site are you using this on? Glad to hear you’re trying this. If it works out and we can get the playlist function happening, I know folks will appreciate it, I’ve had quite a few people ask about that recently. Thanks and please keep us posted!

  109. Thanks Marcia! Emailed you the snippet, please let me know if that works for you and if it works with this playlist function you found.

  111. That’s great to hear, Bob, thanks. How’d you do it? With your own locally hosted player, or with ours or other?

  112. That would be great!

    I’m not finding easy solutions so far…

    But as I said, I’m just an amateur coder….

  113. Bob,

    do you mean the playlist of the Yahoo Player itself, or did you get the xspf playlists on a page working? The playlist is working fine allright, but the problem is that links on the page to xspf playlists are not working anymore. They used to be incorporated in the playlist as hierarchical nested (and collapsible) sub-playlists. A very nice feature that I’m trying to get working again (so far, no luck…)

  114. Sorry jaap, misunderstood the problem. Yes, just the playlist on WebPlayer is all I checked, not external files.

  115. OK,

    I’m still trying to figure it out.

    Learning a lot, by the way, about JSONP…

    Will post the solution as soon as I solved this puzzle!!

  116. OK, first (little) succes: I have a proof of concept. Playing a Xspf playlist right now!!

    Now I have to modify the code to get a stable, working playlister,,,

    to be continued

  117. Yay! That’s great news, Jaap! Please post your notes (and a link to your player/playlist use?) when u get it settled! Thanks, Eric

  118. Got it working now on my local XAMP server. Will upload a working example and the code tomorrow (I have to sing tonight, there are more things to life than puzzling javascript… 🙂

  119. Little bit of delay…. My Server has alloq_fopen_url set to false; can’t change that, have to seek a solution. Maybe tomorrow….

  122. OK, I’ve set it all up , just waiting for the server to alter het allow_fopen_url setting; then i’ll post….

    Hopefully today or tomorrow

  123. Great! Thanks for the updates, Jaap!

    So glad to hear this has been working out, and shaping up with a community effort. I have received some nice emails, and apparently the snippet I’ve been sending around has worked well so far. Feel free to send me a ping, anyone else who wants to try it out. Cheers and thanks,

    Eric

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