Thank you for the reply Jason! I hadn't noticed it till this morning. Last night I played with send_file and while it "works" I ran into two problems. The first might be fixable , that being, the send_file helper seems to take the header information from the file, and insert it into the html audio component type option. I did trying hard coding it into the helper options, but a) it didn't stick , while I tried using 'audio/mp3' , it reverts back to 'audio/mpeg'. Still it works like that but nothing I could do with type audio/flac. Just keeps going into octet stream and I get a download of the file.
The second issue which is, I think, a side effect of the way send_file works is it just creates an html page with the player as the only component in the body. I wanted the player as a partial , perhaps as a footer or something. I haven't figured out if that is doable or not.
Lastly, I was playing around with some javascript to preview files (onclick links, etc) but I think it still wouldn't work with the files outside of public.