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An Audio Posting How-To

I have occasionally wanted to add audio to my blog posts, like the other day when I read a story I had written or in the past when I’ve decided you needed to hear me play the piano, sing a song or whistle through a tonette with piano accompaniment.

Blogger makes it easy to add photos and video, but it sure doesn’t make it easy to add audio, and I have had to do some digging to make sound happen. In case you have wondered how to add audio to your blog posts, I thought it might be helpful if I offered a step-by-step how-to. Here is how I do it:


First I downloaded Audacity, a free application that acts like a traditional recording device. The graphics are easy to follow because the buttons are recognizable. You simply record from your computer through Audacity and save the file. Then you’ll need to export the file as an mp3 file.

Nothing is ever easy, though, and Audacity can’t do that all by itself. You have to download a LAME file for that—libmp3lame.dylib. Once you’ve downloaded it, direct Audacity to it in order to give you an mp3 file of your recording.

After you have the file exported, you’ll need a player to display on your blog. I have used a few different sources for that over the years, but two of the sites have become defunct, so I now use DivShare. It offers a free option, which is just fine for my purposes, and probably for yours, too. At DivShare, you upload your mp3 file and then select it, and the site allows you to choose a style of player to display. Then you copy the embedding code. In your blog post, using the HTML mode, copy the code where you want your player to display within your post, and voila. You have audio.

Blogger should allow us to post audio clips as easily as video, but it doesn’t, so this is just about the next best thing. If you know of an easier way, please share. To show you what I'm talking about, I followed all of these steps and got this, a Christmas treat, unless you're a musician, in which case, a Christmas fruitcake:

 

Comments

dive said…
I like fruitcake.
Henry the Eighth must be smiling (wherever he is) at your lovely, jazzy rendition of his ditty, Robyn.
I could listen to you play all day, so now that you've figured out the sound clip process perhaps you would be kind enough to play some more for us.

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