Embedding a Music Player in your Blog

Embedding a very simple music player into a blog posting is extremely easy. Although this posting will make no sense in my Facebook Notes feed (it will only makes sense in the original blog), here's how to do it:

First, you need an mp3. You'd better make sure that it's legal, just to keep yourself out of trouble. So make sure that it's one of your own personal musical works, or get permission from the author to use it.

Once you have the mp3, upload it onto a server somewhere. Yes, I'm assuming that you have a little bit of technical know-how at this point. If you don't, start scouring the internet and come back once you've learned how to perform this magical hocus-pocus. But if you already know how, either put your mp3 onto a free server, or if you want a more permanent home, buy an account from an ISP (internet service provider). One example would be Netfirms. They are the company that I use to host all of my sites. You can get a pretty basic plan for $5/month US, which allows you 10 gigs of storage and something like 250 gigs per month to be transferred. If you have grandiose dreams, they have a major plan right on sale for $99 right now (maybe only for the holidays) which gives you a full year with 250 gigs of storage and 2500 gigs per month of bandwidth. Just to let you know, that's a lot. My entire DJ Bolivia website doesn't even quite use that much, although it's getting pretty close.

Anyway, once you have the mp3 on a server somewhere, you need to put the following html code into your blog posting. Just cut & paste the whole thing, directly from my blog here:

<embed src= "http://www.odeo.com/flash/audio_player_standard_gray.swf" quality="high" width="300" height="52" allowScriptAccess="always" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars= "valid_sample_rate=true&external_url=http://your_server_name/name_of_the_mp3.mp3" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"> </embed>

Of course, in the middle of that code you'll see a section of a URL that says "your_server_name/name_of_the_mp3." Make sure you change that info to your own server/host and filename. And I only put the underscores in there to make it readable, but you don't have to do the same.

Here's what the player will look like on your blog posting:



It's very simple, but that's all there is to it. Good luck.