This post has been updated and is located here.
For those interested in taking advantage of Wordpress.com’s great new audio player, but are not sure how — and/or don’t want to pay to do so — here’s one way that’s both free and easy.
Afterwards you’ll be able to do this with any .mp3 on your computer (click play):
[audio http://images.joebird.multiply.com/song/1/2/full/U2FsdGVkX19Bzim0uwF7H9DnyO,LIrKzRzYhiKeqMoPD4xVhnStoQw==/Waiting%20Room.mp3]Artist: Fugazi | Song: Waiting Room
This might not be the best way of doing things (there are plenty of places to host your files) but again — doing it this way is free, and it works*:
[Update: The player has never faulted for me, but I hear this might not be the case for everyone. Set-up also might go a little differently for Windows users during step #6. Anyhow, leave a comment if you’re trying it; hopefully I’ll know more soon. - Joe]
[Update 1/26/07: As of now, I’m no longer confidant this method is stable enough to be labeled ‘working.’ It’s obvious that Multiply doesn’t like people remotely accessing the .mp3s it hosts for free. It looks like a string randomizes the would-be static URL of the file. Hence broken links/streams/dreams. Looking for new work-arounds. Will update when found. Thanks. - Joe]
1.) Sign up at Multiply.com. I’m not affiliated with them in any way, nor do I know much about them. What I do know is they host .mp3 files for free, and I can’t find anything on their site that (yet) defines a storage cap.
2.) Once you’re done registering, go to your page (http://yourusername.multiply.com), and click where it says upload music on your music tab:
3.) Browse your computer and choose your audio file. Click upload:
4.) Once the upload is finished, go to your music page (http://yourusername.multiply.com/music).
5.) Left-click where it says ‘download’:
6.) Highlight and copy the page’s URL as your song is playing.
7.) Final steps. Get into your Wordpress.com dashboard and create a new post or a new page.
8.) Select the code tab, not the visual tab.
9.) Paste the URL into the following template: [audio ]
It should look something like this in your editor:
Make sure there are no spaces anywhere — except one after the word ‘audio’.
10.) Publish and enjoy!
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| Technorati tags: audio-player, tutorial, wordpress, wordpress.com, plug-in
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21 responses so far ↓
1 Joe // Jan 24, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Please leave a quick comment regarding whether or not the Fugazi song actually plays for you. I’ve been hearing it’s not foolproof for everyone and am interested to get to the bottom of it.
I’d also like to know if you’ve had success using the player via Multiply or not, and whether my instructions were consistent to your experience setting it up.
Thanks!
2 Juan // Jan 24, 2007 at 7:33 pm
Joe,
First off, nice tutorial!
The Fugazi song didn’t play for me. Right now I’m on a Mac and I’ve tested this in Firefox 2.0 and Safari 2.0.4. The player keeps ‘buffering’ but that’s about it.
3 John // Jan 24, 2007 at 11:32 pm
It still won’t play for me either, and a smaller file on my blog has made no difference in results.
4 Joe // Jan 25, 2007 at 10:49 am
Thanks for the feedback, guys. I’ll update this post again if I hear any sturdy fixes. Some people out there are also trying to stream using Odeo, but that also seems to not be foolproof at this point.
Just tried playing the song and now it’s giving ME the perpetual buffering treatment — when it’s always worked and I haven’t played with the code at all. Looks like the service is still pretty fritzy.
5 Juan // Jan 25, 2007 at 7:12 pm
Joe, I found out why the player won’t play the .mp3 file.
You see, there’s a string in the file path:
/song/1/2/[string]/Waiting%20Room.mp3
This seems to be a base 64 encoded string that perhaps contains a session ID or something. This string seems to change every time, thus making the player not able to find the .mp3 file.
I noticed this because the first time I copied the path and pasted it into the player tags, the player didn’t work at all, it kept buffering the file. When I went back to the page to check the file location to see if there was a way to ‘cheat’ the system (like taking out the string), I noticed that such string was different from the one I previously copied and pasted.
Then, just to make sure that this string was the cause of the never ending buffering, I uploaded the file to my server where the path to the .mp3 file would be ’static’ and voila… the player worked!
Hope this info helps, man
6 Joe // Jan 25, 2007 at 9:20 pm
Juan, great work tracking that — thanks. I’ve had a strong feeling it was on Multiply’s end. I thought initially along the same lines — that the code might mutate to dissuade/prevent remote access, but I didn’t notice it doing so (identical pastes), and since it was working for me, I wasn’t sure what would interfere with the stream for other people. Maybe the string doesn’t change every single time.
Bleh. So from here it probably looks like screw Multiply. And likely most other free sites, as well, for the purposes of what I’m trying (hosted streaming for free through the Wordpress player). I’ve heard Odeo might be a little more reliable through the Wordpress player — but there’s five or six podcast hoops to jump through. I’ve also heard that their player works on Wordpress.com, but I’m skeptical since I’ve seen a lot of code get stipped around here.
Anyhoo. Maybe I’ll give it a shot.
7 carys // Jan 26, 2007 at 4:11 am
hi and thanks for the tutorial!
)
juan: ‘I uploaded the file to my server where the path to the .mp3 file would be ’static’ and voila… the player worked!’
juan (or joe), could you please specify which ’server’ you uploaded the file to? i’m not an english native speaker, so it’s not clear to me which server you’re talking about (plus i’m kind of green in general when it comes to servers
thanks a lot!
carys
8 Juan // Jan 26, 2007 at 10:40 am
@carys,
When I said ‘my server’ I meant the location where I’m hosting my main blog at, which is ‘outside’ wordpress.com.
Hope this answers your question.
9 Joe // Jan 26, 2007 at 12:05 pm
carys, thanks for participating. And your English is actually pretty great.
Like Juan said, ‘his’ server functions totally separately from both Wordpress.com and Multiply. While the servers for those two sites have certain restrictions regarding what kind of data can be stored and how it can be accessed, Juan’s server doesn’t play any (or as many) tricks on him.
I just amended the top of the tutorial to reflect how it’s currently broken, but like I say there, I’ll update again when a more stable method is known. (Juan, let me know if you know?)
Thanks again!
10 John // Jan 27, 2007 at 3:21 am
Too bad. I really had my hopes up!
11 Joe // Jan 27, 2007 at 12:11 pm
I just tried here and got excited until I realized they do a similar trick switching the file’s URL after every play. grrr.
12 Juan // Jan 27, 2007 at 4:30 pm
Joe,
I found a free mp3 hosting provider. They give you 10GB of space, 10GB of monthly bandwidth and an ad supported personal website with your playlists and a music player, but the good thing is that you can still link to your mp3 files from external websites.
Once you sign up, create a playlist, then upload your song. After that, you will see a link with the name of your .mp3 file, right click on it to copy the URL and paste it into the audio tag. That’s it!
I tested it and it works fine. Make sure your playlist is set to public, otherwise the player won’t be able to open the file.
Oh, before I forget, the site’s URL is:
www.musicwebtown.com
HTH
13 Joe // Jan 27, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Juan, you are a rockstar. (assuming this works.
)
I’m going to try it now.
About your comment - my spam filter nabbed it for some reason.
14 Juan // Jan 27, 2007 at 4:47 pm
you replied while I was writing. Thanks!
15 John // Jan 27, 2007 at 5:12 pm
It finally works! Nice job guys…
16 elelespaciodemartha // Jan 29, 2007 at 11:06 pm
Yo por mas que he intentado con varios servidores de archivos de musica y siguiendo las indicaciones que ustedes dan, aun no logro poner un archivo de audio en wordpress… ¿alguien que me pueda ayudar?
Se los agradecere muchisimo.
17 Joe // Jan 30, 2007 at 1:31 pm
elelespaciodemartha, no hablo espanol muy bueno, pero yo quiero ayudar tu. Los instrucciones nuevo esto aqui. ?Problemas quedarse? Escribir una vez más, por favor. Gracias.
18 bohsnews // Feb 20, 2007 at 12:47 am
I’ve been tearing my hair out with Odeo for ages. I tried musicwebtown and it’s worked first time…
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