Playing Audio on Your WordPress.com site

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We have our audio and we have our website, now in this Episode 16 of Create Your Life Story we bring them together in one place for the world to be able to easily access and listen to your Life Story.

The great thing about having a WordPress.com site is that it’s completely free and fully maintained. There are no issues with having to deal with the “back end” of the site as an ongoing concern. However as with all things there is no such thing as a free lunch and with a WordPress.com site there are some restrictions on the way you can use the site. WordPress.com do this to ensure that those who are using the WordPress.com sites don’t bring malicious code that can damage things for everyone and in the case of today’s subject so that people don’t abuse the free nature and use up too many of the resources of WordPress.com by hosting large media files such as audio and video.

It’s easy to play video files through your WordPress.com site that are hosted on sites such as YourTube, Vimeo and Viddler by using the embed code available from the hosting sites.

Audio like video also needs to be hosted on a service to then be linked back to your site at WordPress.com. There are paid services such as Amazon S3 and Libsyn but like having your own hosted WordPress.org site there are costs and maintenance issues and it’s important that once you have completed your Life Story project, it remains permanently, without fear of disappearing because you forgot to maintain the fees or there is now no one left to care for it.

Archive.org the Perfect Place for Your Audio Files

The Internet Archive (Archive.org) is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission: “universal access to all knowledge.” It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitised materials, including websites, music, moving images, and books.

By placing the audio files at Archive.org they will be stored for all time and your website can then play the audio by link to the files at Archive.org.

* Go to  Archive.org

* Click on “Join Us”

* Fill out “Email Address”, “Screen Name”, “Desired Password” then “Confirm Password”

* Click on “Get Library Card”

Next you need to upload your complete audio files.

* Click “Upload” button to the top right

* Then “Share” button to the top right

* Browse for the media you want to upload. You can select more than one file, or you can click the Share button again to select additional files.

For additional information go to this page at Archive.org

Upload all the files related to this single Life Story at once so they are all the individual files are held on a single page like chapters. If someone is listening on Archive.org they will then be able to move onto the next chapter on the list. Once the files are uploaded you can then edit the information to include text and images.

Privacy at Archive.org

Privacy at for your WordPress.com site is available by selecting the level you require when you are writing a post or page however with Archive....