How do I use AJAX to keep music playing continuously without using framesets?

[adrianj]

Topic.

 

I just recently completed a website for my younger brother who is a singer.  Well in the process of designing the site with basic html/php/js I hit a serious road block: how will I allow for his music to play from page to page without it starting over each time a page reloads?

 

Serious concerns are serious. 

 

I went over the options that I was familiar with (I don't build websites very often) and narrowed my possibilities down to 3 or 4 bad options: (a) rebuilding the entire site in flash, which would have no real pages, (b) load the music in some sort of separate pop-up (no!), © loading the audio in a hidden frameset frame controlled by the main frame.

 

Those being the limit of my web programming knowledge, I went with the later option.  To be honest, the site works fine in every browser using the frameset (including my cell phone)...but I'd rather do without.  While asking opinions from my friends, one suggested that I could somehow use AJAX.  I've since googled the idea and have found that it might be possible to load basically all of the site into a div container wrapper, then load the audio in a second div container which would simply never change.  Is this correct?  If so, that could certainly be a solution.  I've solid in my CSS stuff and can handle that with ease..but I'd need a little bit of guidance with regard to the way to approach the AJAX + PHP/ASP.

 

Also, it sparks another question: If the site is set up like that, will search engines be able to crawl the site properly?  after all, this approach would more or less yield a 100% dynamic site, right?  And would I be able to make the url look like a normal url?

 

any thoughts or ideas will be greatly appreciated.  thanks in advance for the help!

 

website in question: http://www.jshoc.com