I wanted to post an interview that I did recently on our corporate blog, but I didn’t have time to build an integrated audio player and do all the necessary development. I looked for all of them… jQuery players, Flash players, Audio plugins, etc. I was about to pull my hair out until I found a neat little way to do it… using Google’s audio player.
Google has an audio player for Google Reader that can basically be pointed to any MP3 file. It’s pretty simple… just copy the embed code just as you would a YouTube video and update the MP3 file location (MP3_FILE_URL). We’re using Compendium for our corporate blog so I just clicked the source, copied the code, pointed to the hosted MP3 file and I was ready to publish!
<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="audioUrl=MP3_FILE_URL" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3523697345-audio-player.swf" width="400" height="27" quality="best">
There are many more robust players out there – and we’ll eventually integrate one. It’s not the prettiest audio player but, for now, it does the trick!
If you’re publishing on a site that doesn’t allow script code or access to the source files, this could be of use. It’s much nicer than making someone download the mp3 files manually and try to figure out how to open them!
