Lazy Sunday: Yodeling for Mary B.

In a comment to one of my recent posts, Mary Baker from Dover Canyon asked

...can you explain to me (us) how to go about uploading an audio link in Typepad? I have a 3 min. audio clip of a song inspired by one of our vineyards. But apparently I have only 1KB of allowed storage on Typepad, and the file is a little over 3KB. Should I just provide a link to the composer's iTune address? I would really like readers to be able to listen to the clip while reading the post that tells the story behind "Catarina's Dream."

Here's the answer:

Start by using "Insert File" in TypePad's post editing menu, and upload the file.  The default code from "Insert File" produces the following code:

<p><a href="http://blog.winerywebsitereport.com/files/yyodel.mp3">Download yyodel.mp3</a> </p>

which in turn creates a link like this:

Download yyodel.mp3

which opens a new browser window to play the file when clicked.

If you then use the Edit HTML tab to modify the HTML code to look like:

<p><embed src="http://blog.winerywebsitereport.com/files/yyodel.mp3" type="audio/mpeg" autostart="0"></embed> </p>

you will get a much nice audio control that looks like this: 

and works the way you'd like/expect it to.

Basically, you use the "Insert File" command to transfer the file to TypePad, and then modify the HTML to create a an embedded player that refers to it.  If you want the sound to play automatically, set the autostart parameter to 1.

More information from the TypePad knowledge base:

• How do I post audio clips to my weblog?
• How do I create a podcast with TypePad?
• How can I post a video clip to my weblog?

This audio file is about 40 Kbytes in size, and I didn't have any trouble uploading it.  I don't know why Mary has so little space available on her TypePad account (you get between 100 MB and 1GB depending on the type of account you have), but I'm happy to try and help figure that out, too.

I'm looking forward to hearing "Catarina's Dream" while reading the story behind it.

(my choice of sample music here is not an endorsement of Yahoo!, but I figured they wouldn't mind me using it)

Comments

[Virtual Foodie]

Hi - great advice and excellent timing! I recently attempted to add audio to my website via Go Daddy's Website Tonight and I have a wonderful soundbite that I made myself and, apparently, it is at the wrong speed! Sounds great when I play it off the website but turns into chipmunks on it!

Thanks!

Kate

[el jefe]

One thing: I found if you do the audio control thing, it will load the whole clip. Probably not a problem at 40k, but a 500k hi-fi clip gets noticed by your readers (this I know because they told me!) In this case you may want to simply offer a download link...

[Mary B.]

Thanks, Mike! This is a great help. Sorry to take so long to respond . . . with wine festivals, vineyard work, kids getting out of school, it's been a hectic few weeks. I finally found out that the .mp3 file the composer sent was captured by Yahoo!Music Engine and that's why it wouldn't load as a pure .mp3. I have asked the composer to send me a new file, and I hope to get the file uploaded and playable soon!

[Rokko]

Very interesting site ! Good work ! Congratulations :)