DSMI plug-in installation instructions

By Julien Pierre

Installation instructions
This version of NPDSMI should be installed on Navigator 2.02 for OS/2 General Availability.

If you have JavaScript enabled in your browser, you can check the plug-in page for an update anytime you want by selecting "About Plugins" in Navigator, and then clicking on the Digital Sound & Music Interface for OS/2 plug-in, which will bring you to this page.

Here is what you need to do to use the plug-in :


 * Download the NPDSMI.ZIP package
 * Unzip it in the PLUGINS subdirectory of your Netscape Navigator.
 * Close Navigator/2 if it is opened.
 * Start Navigator/2.
 * Load Navigator/2 with the player.htm page. You should hear a tune playing on your soundcard.
 * Load the stop.htm page and bookmark it so you can later stop playback easily.
 * You can also now load this page and hear music !
 * You can also go to Ñhttp://web.archive.org/web/20010420102603/http://www.thetaband.com:80/npdsmi/nptest.html this page], which has some music files to play !!!

Direct Audio Real Time required
This plug-in requires Direct Audio Real Time - DART.

DART is included in OS/2 Warp version 4 (Merlin).

For OS/2 Warp version 3, users, you need to get Direct Audio Real Time DLL support. This support is included in OS/2 Warp Fixpak 26 or later.

Embedding a music file
You can now put the following tag in your page :

 

Put the MUSIC.MOD module file in the same directory as the HTML file, and Netscape Navigator for OS/2 users with this plug-in will be able to hear the tune !

Stopping a music file
The package comes with a page called stop.htm. It is highly recommended that you bookmark this page, so that you'll be able to stop music at anytime by simply using the bookmark menu.

Changes from the first version

 * Embedding music in a page on a web server
 * Here is good news for those who used the first beta of Navigator/2 and the first version of NPDSMI : this limitation is gone. You can just embed your file as described above, and it will work on any web server as long as you have the TYPE="audio/x-mod" parameter on your EMBED tag.


 * Added the STOP tag, used on the stop.htm page. Users no longer have to wait for a file to end playing or stop Navigator.
 * The plug-in is now able to detect if you come back on a page which already has music playing, and will not restart the song from the beginning anymore.
 * The music files are now loaded in a background thread, so as not to hurt the ultra fast responsiveness of the Navigator/2 user interface for more than 10 milliseconds ;-).
 * The plug-in checks that the file you pass it are really music files. If they aren't, they will be ignored, and the current music file will continue to play.
 * Everything was linked statically in a single plug-in DLL. You no longer need to update your LIBPATH. Also, this makes the plug-in code shrink about half in size.

Disclaimer
There is no warranty of any kind that the DSMI plug-in will perform or not perform any task. Try it at your own risk.

Note that the DSMI plug-in for Netscape Navigator is constantly evolving. The first version of the DSMI plug-in was written in one night.