Audio Widget URLs not accepted

  • Unknown's avatar
    justins205 · Member ·

    My website is not online yet. I have added an audio widget. First it will not let me paste a URL for a youtube song. Do I need to have my site online for the box to accept urls? Second, none of the file types listed are music files! I don’t really want to clog it up with audio files – urls would be perfect. What am I doing wrong?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • staff-theo · Staff ·

    Hey Justins205,

    When you open the audio widget and click, “Add Audio,” below the Add Audio option in the top left corner should be a link to “Insert from URL.” Note that this will only accept links to audio files (for example, if the URL ends with .mp3).

    For links to YouTube, you would have to use the Video widget.

    For embedding YouTube videos in other ways, you can check out our YouTube tutorials here: https://en.support.wordpress.com/videos/youtube/

    I hope this helps! Feel free to reach out if you have any other questions.

  • samva8c · Staff ·

    Hi justins205,

    It is not possible to include a YouTube video URL in the audio widget. This is also because it currently violates YouTube’s Terms of Service to separate the audio from a video, which is why I suspect WordPress.com systems are unable to embed it in that fashion,

    To embed YouTube links you will need to add them via the Video widget. Please follow the instructions provided by scosgro to do so.

    If in case you own the YouTube based songs in question, my advice would be to use a service like SoundCloud to upload your tracks and then you can use the SoundCloud Audio Player on WordPress.com:
    https://en.support.wordpress.com/soundcloud-audio-player/

    Thanks!

  • Unknown's avatar
    justins205 · Member ·

    Wow! You guys are so helpful! I can’t believe I was so stupid to think a video was only audio – of course I need the video widget! It’s just that the only reason I use Youtube is to listen to songs, so I automatically thought I wanted the audio widget. I never even think of the video side of things – I’m just listening to songs on Youtube with a static image and that’s all I want to add.

    The video widget works perfectly for me to add the Youtube URLs in the sidebar – thank you! Just one question – is there a multi-video widget for compilations? It seems I need to add a new widget per video, which takes up quite a bit of space – it’s not a huge problem, just thought I’d ask.

    Thanks again, Justin

  • staff-theo · Staff ·

    Hey justins205,

    I’ve been trying to get playlists to work on my end, but unfortunately, it looks like the widget is only capable of handling one video at a time. I also tried adding the playlist into a text widget, but couldn’t get it to convert to the video.

    Sorry about that! If I can figure out a way to get the one widget to handle multiple videos, I’ll make sure to come back and post here. Best of luck!

  • Unknown's avatar
    justins205 · Member ·

    Hey Scosgro,

    Thanks for your attempts to solve my query! In fact I have spent the rest of the evening adding loads of video widgets down the right hand side of my page – they actually look great! I’m going for quite a minimal look in dark grey and white so the youtube video thumbnails add some welcome colour and interest. They are just big enough to see the images. However, it would be nice to have a smaller player, for instance on a homepage where everything could be more-or-less in one place.

    Thanks again,
    Justin

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