Do you want your blog visitors to hear your voice? Do you need to represent your post as audio? Do you want to give your readers a choice for their convenience, so that they could either read you post or listen to it? If yes, read this post to learn how to post audio to blog.
There are two popular techniques of audio blogging – podcasting and using flash audio players. What to use – voice podcast or audio post – depends on what your aim is.
Podcasting
If you want your visitors to receive sound files through RSS feed, you should create a podcast. It can be done by adding URL(s) of your audio files as the enclosure links to your post. To do this, go to your Settings, open Formatting tab and set the "Show Link fields" option to "Yes". After adding your file as an enclosure link, you blog becomes a podcast. Now reader of your RSS will see your podcasts as a small audio player and be able to listen to your message directly in RSS reader. To get into technical details and learn how to further customize your podcast, visit Blogger Help Center. It's a great stuff for everyone who wants to send his voice posts to RSS subscribers. The only disadvantage of Blogger podcasting is that the player to hear your audio post can be seen by RSS readers only, not by usual blog readers. How to mend it?
Flash mp3 player
If you want your visitors to listen to your voice message directly in a post, the best solution for you is to embed a flash audio player to stream voice. Voice is streamed online similarly to any other mp3 files with the help of flash mp3 player. To record voice as mp3, you have to use special voice recording software or a good flash mp3 player maker. I use Fun SoundPlayer Maker software which allows to record voice, convert it to mp3 and embed to a flash audio player without using any external voice recorders. So, how to create a flash button for turning sound on/off with Fun SoundPlayer Maker and embed it into your post? All you have to do is to choose suitable player template, select an existing audio file or record a new audio post directly in the program, customize player and save it as an SWF file for further embedding into blog. Detailed instruction how to post audio player to blog and tips on creating flash mp3 players and hosting your files you can find in one of my previous posts – How to embed audio into a blog or MySpace. To let your visitors download original mp3 file directly from the post without subscribing to RSS (like podcast players do), simply host both swf player and mp3 file and assign a download link for mp3. It'll look like this.
So, it's up for you to decide what technology of posting audio to blog you need more. Or, maybe, you'd like mp3 podcast and flash mp3 player to supplement each other. My post has both embedded mp3 player and a voice podcast (you can subscribe to my RSS feed to see how it works).
P.S. Both podcasting and flash mp3 player can be used for streaming music files as well as voice recordings.
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1 comments:
Great post with some useful tips. I'm interested in starting some podcasting myself so I'll give these tools a look. Thanks for sharing!
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