ADDING AUDIO

Adding audio clips to your Wordpress site can be done in a number of ways. This chapter is a guide for one of the most simple ways to do it. If you are interested in more possibilities, look at the "Podcasting" chapter as well.

Using Audio Player Plugin

This section applies only to self-hosted sites. If you are on Wordpress.com you can skip to the section at the end of this chapter.

Install and activate the Audio Player Plugin ¹. Download and install the plugin in the normal way. This plug in has no settings that need to be altered.

Where is your audio file?

To be able to add an audio player to your page, you need to know the full URL of the where your audio file is stored. This is a direct link to the mp3 file. In other words you need somewhere to upload your audio to that allows you to directly link to those files.

You may be able to set up your site so that you can upload audio files. Refer to the "Upload Settings" chapter for information about how to do this.

If you can't upload audio files to your WordPress site then Archive.org is one website that allows this. You can see a link to an Mp3 in the screenshot below:

To copy that link you can right-click (Ctrl + Click on Mac) on the link and select Copy Link Location.

 Add the audio to a post

Once you have this direct link to the file, you can create an entry in your blog to stream the audio file with the Flash player.

Create a post which describes your file and add the following code within the body text of the entry:

 [audio:http://www.example.org/linkto.mp3]

This will look like this in the Wordpress edit interface:

 

Click Publish on the right of your screen and then View Post. 

If your browser has the Flash player plug-in installed (which is standard in most browsers), you will see a simple player; click on the play arrow to play the audio file from your browser.

The player is basic but quite functional. You can skip forward to different parts of the file and the time elapsed of the audio file is also displayed. 

Adding Audio to a WordPress.com site

The ability to add audio to a site at Wordpress.com is already built in. Follow the instructions above but with a slight change to the short code you add: replace the colon with a space, as shown in the example below. 

 [audio http://www.example.org/linkto.mp3]

1. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/audio-player/^{^}