There are tons of plugins available to embed audio/video in your blog.
The things I don’t like with many of them are (a) they usually use “short codes”- things you hand write in brackets to indicate the location and source for the media (plus some options. Writing these means have to remember the structure, but more so, if you ever have to change to a different plugin down the road, you are left with short codes that might not mean anything.
For years I had use Anarchy Media Player for the simplicity that all you had to was create a normal hyperlink to your media, and Anarchy would replace it with the suitable player. However, I had some major conflict issues with Anarchy last year, I noticed its javascript was hanging on loading, and in term hung my entire blog. I zapped it.
For some reason I was thinking today about a new project where I wanted to have a simple embeddable audip player. Long ago I had used Taragana’s player, which makes use of the delciious.com PlayTagger. It too was simple, it replaced any hypertext link to an MP# with a small svelte player.
But I poked around the WordPress Plugins site, and landed on the WPaudio MP3 player– and got grabbed at the lead in:
Plugin with attitude, bring it on! It works great, you can make it so any href tag that points to an MP3 uses the plugin (which is what I did), or you can make it so any links with a special css class are displayed with the player. I also modified the CSS a little to match my styles.
So for the blog post where I have audio of me explaining Twitter to my Mom, the hyperlink for this is written like regular HTML
Cowboy Glimmer)
So if I ever get rid of the plugin at least I have valid code. And It Just Works. Here’s a little sample, I think this is just some quick track I made in GarageBand- just give the player a click.
I am sure someone will comment with some other solution or better approach! But I like this one so far.
UPDATE August 15, 2011: If this player is not working for you in WordPress 3.x, apparently there is an edit you need to do to the plugin (since the developer is apparently not doing it) which fixed the player for me– see http://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-mp3-play-button-just-a-link?replies=9#post-2201546
Works great! But the RSS version of your post doesn’t have the embedded player, just a link which plays the music in a new window with my default player.
Ah, Pyesetz the Dog beat me to it. I found this plugin last week as well, and love how it looks in the Chrome browser, but was disappointed that the player didn’t show up in the feed that I set up in Blackboard for students. They don’t currently visit the blog. They just read, listen and watch the content that shows up in Blackboard. I was just thinking I needed a new plugin when I saw your post. I guess I need to keep looking. Let me know if you try anything else.