Embed a MP3 Audio File in a WordPress.com Blog Post

WordPress.com is a good, free blogging platform, but it can be trickier than Posterous to get rich media (like audio and video files) embedded in posts. Unlike Posterous, which lets users directly email audio and video files to a site where they are automatically converted to an “embedded form,” with WordPress.com you need to post your audio and video files to ANOTHER website and then use (for audio) a special code so it will be embedded. (If you purchase a WordPress.com space upgrade you can directly upload audio files, but free WordPress.com sites can’t.) In this post I’ll explain how to embed an mp3 audio file on a free (non-upgraded) WordPress.com site.

Last Sunday in our 6th grade class, students recorded an 81 second audio podcast about the theme, “Our Words are Powerful.” Since free accounts on AudioBoo.fm permit users to not only record audio using a web browser or smartphone, but also UPLOAD audio, I used it today to upload the audio from our 6th grade class. AudioBoo does not provide (as Cinch.fm does) a direct download link to the mp3 audio file for a specific Boo, however. To view and copy this link, I copied the RSS feed for my AudioBoo channel.

I pasted that link into my Safari web browser, which does a nice job handling RSS feeds and displaying them in a readable format. I then copied the direct mp3 audio file link.

I then created a new post on our 6th Grade Sunday School WordPress blog, and used special “short code” for embedding mp3 audio files in the HTML view of the post.

It would be nice if WordPress.com allowed the default AudioBoo embed code to work, as shown below, but for security reasons they don’t. On a self-hosted WordPress blog (like the one you’re reading right now) it’s possible to use this embed code, but not on WordPress.com. The WordPress.com site administrators have disabled some embed codes to “protect us” from malicious code, I think. Fortunately, this “short code” technique is pretty straightforward to use ONCE you have the direct URL to the mp3 audio file you’d like to use. There are other ways to do this too, but I like the short code method.

What other techniques do you use to embed audio on your blog?

Technorati Tags: audio, blog, wordpress, embed, mp3

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