Audio

This page is sorely out of date… Technology for incorporating audio files in WordPress pages has changed in the dozen years it has been here. But it is where I began my research into using audio players and podcast feeds with wordpress.com accounts, which eventually led to my jheroes.com podcast.

It took a little bit of searching, but here’s the audio info page.

Original version of this page:
The basic WordPress.com editing window’s “upload/insert” menu includes a musical-notes icon labeled “add audio.” Clicking on it produces this message:

Add media files from your computer
Allowed file types: jpg, jpeg, png, gif, pdf, doc, ppt, odt, pptx, docx, pps, ppsx, xls, xlsx.
Maximum upload file size: 1GB
After a file has been uploaded, you can add titles and descriptions.

You can upload mp3, m4a, wav, ogg audio files and increase your available space with a Space Upgrade. You can upload videos and embed them directly on your blog with a Video Upgrade.

Apparently the space upgrade is required for any use of audio on WordPress.com sites, even if you plan to stay within the standard “free storage” space allocation. This page says more about file formats.

As the audio page explains, a free WordPress site can be used with a built-in player to present MP3 files that are stored elsewhere on the Web. Here’s my first experiment with that idea, using an MP3 file hosted at archive.org

This is the 52-minute Hollywood Radio Theater version of the often quoted, but hard to find, newspaper movie, Deadline USA.  With the movie version, you had Humphrey Bogart, but Dan Dailey is a strong lead as the crusading editor in  this 1953 radio broadcast. When originally posted here, this file had a different address. The Internet Archive may have changed it, or the old-time-radio collector who stored it there may have came up with a new approach to file naming. (For example, some have updated their way of handling spaces between words in long file names. This one uses hyphens; some use underscore characters and some use the “%20” encoding for a blank space.

(“Hollywood Radio Theater” was Lux Radio Theater minus the soap commercials, for re-broadcast over the Armed Forces Radio Service, which was the source of this set of broadcasts from 1953 stored at Archive.org, including the one that player launches.)

This is a “Page” in WordPress. Putting the same player on a blog “post” entry adds the MP3 file’s address to the blog’s RSS feed — which makes the feed a “podcast” you can subscribe to with iTunes.

The RSS feed for any WordPress blog is its URL plus the word “feed,” like this: https://stepno.wordpress.com/feed/