A much requested feature has been the ability to host and play multimedia content on WordPress.com and I’m happy to say that with the space upgrade, you can now upload and play mp3 files. You can also upload ogg, wav, m4a, mov, wmv, avi, and mpg files too. We haven’t got a movie player working just yet and simply embedding a large movie file would be unfair to people with slower connections but we’re working on one.

There is a file size limit of 25MB on uploaded files. I hope that will satisfy most needs but if you need to upload larger files, please send us feedback.

Even if you haven’t got the space upgrade, everyone can use the new audio tag to play mp3 files from anywhere on the Internet. Copy the following into a blog post to see it in action:

which will produce the following player:

The recording is 5 minutes from Tom Raftery’s interview with Matt and myself. Check out his Podleaders site for the full interview!

The mp3 player comes from the great Audio Player WordPress plugin which in turn started out as the emff player.