Audio Player for website

Ok, guys & dolls who have website design smarts, I need some help.

I’m a programmer, not a web designer. But we’ve agreed to do a website for one of our good customers, kind of as an experiment. If it goes ok, they get a hell of a deal on a new website, and we get some experience. We’ll never do a lot of this, but it’s nice to be able to offer some basic website design along with our other services.

Anyway, I’ve got a couple of people who have some basic experience doing websites, just personal and real simple commercial sites, a little flash stuff, etc.

But one of the things this customer wants on the site is a music player. They have a changing repertoire of music clips (they have all the permissions required to play these in a public venue) that they want the people looking at the website to play.

They want the user to be able to pick one of a half dozen or so clips (one of our people can periodically update the list of available clips), start, stop, pause the music, and have a small visualization, like the little 6 or 8 bar phony spectrum analyzers you see around on these things.

I don’t much care what format the player requires (mp3, real audio, etc.), we can convert formats as required.

We’ve found some players, but they all seem to fall short in one area or another. One good player doesn’t have a visualization, another requires the user to register to download it the first time they go to the site and try to use it.

I’ve been told that a “flash” type player will just download and run as needed if the user has a browser with flash capability (and we have some other flash elements on the page already, so it’s a given they’re going to have to get the flash plugin to view this thing anyway) so I guess a flash player would be ideal. But I’m open as to what the best way is to do this.

And we’re not afraid to spend a little money on this. It is a commercial site, and we’ve got a little revenue coming in from it.

So, any suggestions on the good way to put a music player on a website?

Ok, some additional information (and a little bump). We found a flash type player last night. It works well, but looks terrible. So a nice flash player would defintely work.

Any suggestions?