A few questions about music on wp.com blogs
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I recently used a couple of the methods of including music in a post at wp.com. They each worked, but raised a few questions in my mind. I couldn’t find the answers by searching the FAQ and Forums, so thought I’d see if anyone could take a shot at them.
1. Is there any way of telling wp.com about how I’d like to place the Songspot within the post? I originally wanted to use a tall, thin Songspot and float it at the right, since my CSS floats images at the right. But I settled for a horizontal Songspot at the foot of the post, as you can see:
http://changingway.org/2007/07/05/songspots-are-sonific/2. I uploaded an mp3 to box.net and I stream it from there using the audio player. It works fine on the blog (after a couple of false starts, the details of which I can’t remember). But the audio player doesn’t show up in the feed. Why not? The post is at:
http://changingway.org/2007/07/06/more-music-cheri-knight/3. The audio player just works if I give it the URL of an MP3 file. The video player, on the other hand, requires that the video be uploaded to wp.com (which in turn requires a space upgrade). I am aware that I can embed video from selected sites such as YouTube. My question is: why does the audio tolerate a URL from any old where, while the video player is fussier? I suspect that the one-word answer is “security,” but I’d be interested in a more detailed response.
Thanks for reading this far, and thanks in advance if you can address any of the above questions.
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1. No. Embeds such as Youtube, Dailymotion, Sonific are styled at the point of display and that would be overridden by any CSS.
2. I’m not sure. I’ll have to find out.
3. Sound does not need an embed. A plain link to an mp3 will just work on most computers. The audio player adds some functionality but underneath there is nothing really going on.
Video comes in a variety of formats. We would need to have players for all formats and this might also reply on the reader’s computer too – for instance if you don’t have Quicktime and you just see that big blue Q when it’s a .mov file. Having many different solutions and players does create a security risk and it also creates confusion about which to use, which do most people have, can I convert, can I show it in more than 1 way in one post etc. So that’s not so good. We needed a standard solution.When you upload a video it is converted to flash. Most machines will run flash. This also means that we don’t have an embedding / security problem.
The downside to this is that the higher quality your video the more pronounced the difference will be following conversion, so it may take a couple of goes to get things right. (The exact specs are buried in a support ticket somewhere).That help?
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Mark,
Thanks very much, that does aid my understanding.
In your response to q1, I think you meant to say that embeds override CSS styling (rather than being overridden by it). -
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The issue I raised as point 2 of the original post, i.e. audio player not showing up in feed, seems to have been resolved. I don’t know if this is part of the same fix described by Andy in the wp.com blog:
http://wordpress.com/blog/2007/07/09/feed-oddities/
Anyway, I wanted to note this to say thanks for the fix, in case others have seen the same problem as I did, and because I’m changing the status of this thread to resolved.
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