My friend has asked me to develop a site to promote his music as an
entertainer. I had thought of creating an image like an mp3 player and
then creating hotspots to control the music, but my minds a bit of a
blank as to what HTML coding to use for the various controls (eg,
play, fast forward, pause, etc)

Any advice would be appreciated before I agree to do the site for him

First of all you should take some minutes and think about the overall
strategy for presenting your friendŽs music online.

If you decide to use the popular mp3 format for presenting the music
you must be aware that this is not a streaming music format. That
means: people will have to download whole mp3 data files before any
music will come out of the speakers of their computers. This is a main
disadvantage of mp3, especially when you want to present the music in
good quality as the file sizes of the mp3 will be rather high (and the
customers will have to wait rather long before any sound becomes
audible)
Setting up an image like a mp3 player does not seem to make sense then
as the music will only play when the file was downloaded and opened in
the customers PC mp3 program. This canŽt be done with simple html
anyway.

A much better choice is to use the real audio format. In this
streaming format the audio data is transferred in packages and at once
(after a short initialization time) the music starts on the customers
PC in excellent quality.
Real Audio is widespread and the real player is available for free
(many browsers have the real support already included).
You can test the fast performance and excellent sound quality of real
audio at this link:

http://www.milessapp.com/realaudio/rev_the_machine.ram

You must however be aware that not all internet service providers
support the hosting of real audio. So youŽll have to ask your
provider.

The helix producer, an easy to handle (and free of charge)  software
for creating real audio files is available at
Real Networks:
( http://www.realnetworks.com/products/producer/basic.html ) 

The code needed for an elegant way to include real audio files on your
website could be:

<!-- -->
<embed SRC="http://your-url.rpm" type="audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin"
CONTROLS="PlayButton" AUTOSTART="FALSE" LOOP="FALSE" VOLUME=100%
WIDTH=40 HEIGHT=13 CONSOLE="MYCONSOLE">
<embed SRC="http://your-url.rpm" type="audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin"
CONTROLS="StopButton" AUTOSTART="FALSE" LOOP="FALSE" VOLUME=100%
WIDTH=20 HEIGHT=13 CONSOLE="MYCONSOLE">
<!-- --> 

or

<!-- -->
<embed SRC="http://your-url.rpm" type="audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin"
CONTROLS="Control" AUTOSTART="FALSE" LOOP="FALSE" VOLUME=100%
WIDTH=400 HEIGHT=100 CONSOLE="MYCONSOLE">
<!-- --> 

You must replace the web adress after the SRC=

both from:
(http://www.123webmaster.com/Onsite/Building/RealAudio.html)

At the cited page you may have a look how these codes will look like
when opened with a web browser.
The first one is a very small play and stop button, the second one
shows more control knobs like forward and backward playing of the
file.

If you need more background info for embedding real audio into a html
page please have a look at:

"Embedding Real Player controls into HTML page"
at 
Blake Out
( http://www.blakout.net/support/embedding_controls_into_html.htm )

In addition to the already given code here youŽll find some very
interesting general hints and an introduction how to use Java language
in this context.

I hope this answer is satisfying for you. Please don’t hesitate to
post a clarification request if anything is not clear to you.

till-ga

Search strategy used:

( ://www.google.de/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=real+player+embedding
)
and
( ://www.google.de/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=real+audio+code
)
and
( ://www.google.de/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=real+audio+syntax
)

wonderfull

Another option would be to use Flash it supports a number of music
formats, can be embedded into the html, doesen't require specialised
hosting, as an animation programme has great graphical potential and
has huge reach across the internet community is supported by most
browsers.

It can also be contolled with javascript have a look at
http://www.webreference.com/js/column85/2.html

I know about this possibility and IŽve used flash  to control audio
files on websites. But the question was how to include it in HTML
sites.
And flash can sometimes be a bit difficult to handle whereas the above
code is simple to use in standard HTML websites.


till-ga

I think this site is a working example of what you ask for in your Question:

http://www.coolSoundtracks.com