Busted Audio
Last night, for a post I was composing, I was pairing an image with with a bit of embedded audio via Lala. When I’d gotten the post together, I decided to have a look using another browser. It was then that I found that only people with Lala accounts are able to listen to the Lala tracks I’ve been posting. Ouch!
I’d looked several times before, and it seemed as long as I’d added the track to my Lala account, the files acted playable through their embedded players. Not sure if I was imagining it or not, but the embed code seemed to change before and after adding the track to the account. Before, I’d be given a 30 second preview. After, the whole track was playable. I don’t know when this broke down because I haven’t been hearing any complaints from people. On the contrary, I’ve actually gotten decent responses from readers / listeners.
What to do now?
I first considered sourcing files from YouTube rather than Lala. There are a ton more tracks that I’d be likely to post already on YouTube. The main problem I see is that I’m both dependent on YouTube as a service as well as the user who posted the track. With that kind of mix there’s no guarantee that the track would remain available. So I approached this the same way I’ve recently approached the images I post to this site.
Originally I thought it nice that I could host images on my Flickr account and drop them into posts here. Flickr would then handle the bandwidth for me. Flickr isn’t going anywhere soon, but at the same time there’s really no guarantee of that. I’ve therefore started grabbing my Flickr images and uploading them straight into Limitless Pulse. This is the solution I’ve arrived at concerning music on this site.
Everyone’s familiar with what seems to be the standard flash mp3 player, WordPress Audio Player. I don’t need a ton of functionality, nor do I care to look for anything else, so I’m sticking with it.
To make a long story short(ish) I’m going to replace the embedded tracks with my own mp3 uploads thereby ensuring people can actually listen to them. There’s more of a rush to get the audio replaced as opposed the the Flickr images. The images are safe, but please bear with me as I get sound straightened out.
