Many people who want to host audio on their sites are surprised that it’s harder than hosting video.
In some cases, not using a player or inserting audio well, can lead to audio files playing simultaneously. Not good.
The challenge with audio files is similar to the challenge with video, and you’d think audio would be simpler, but it’s not.
If you were hosting video clips, I’d recommend YouTube or Vimeo, which enable you to upload videos in MP4 and other video formats and then embed a little code in your site to play for your visitors.
Hosting video on YouTube, Vimeo, or any of the other video sharing sites, gives you several advantages:
1. You save on hosting fees (video and audio files are much larger than text and image sand can get expensive to host on your own server)
2. Video hosting sites automatically convert video files for you and deliver your video in the best formats for each of your visitors based on the type of web browser, computer, or mobile device your visitor is using.
3. Video hosting sites have nice, clean players that make it easy for visitors to start, stop, rewind, etc.
So if you can use Vimeo and YouTube to take care of all those things for you with video files, why can’t you do that with audio files?
The simple answer is that no one has created a YouTube-like solution for audio files, mostly because there is so much piracy in the world of music that few, if any sites, want to get involved.
So here’s a crazy solution many people are using to get around this seeming paradox and make hosting audio files as easy as it is to host video.
The first step is to turn your audio files into videos… That’s not as hard as you might image.
Start a new file in a video editor, such as iMovie or Adobe Premiere, place a still image, such as the cover of one of your books or a photo of the person doing the audio, and then copy the audio file into the video.
The result, is that your audio will play like a video and you can then save it as an MP4, upload it to a video site and embed it into your page, complete with the video player, which works like a great audio player in your case.
It’s not a perfect solution, but it seems that what you need is a way for visitors to your site to stop, start, play, rewind, etc. and converting each sound file into a simple video will make it possible to use these services.
As an alternative, you can host the audio files on your own service and set up a player on your own site. In that case consider searching for an audio player extension for Dreamweaver or some other way to host and play audio, such as a Flash player.
If you’re not sure how to add the embed code from YouTube or Vimeo into your web pages in Dreamweaver, this tutorial shows you how to copy code into code view in Dreamweaver.
Hope that helps,
Janine
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.
You must log in to post a comment.