I’m working on a site that relies on many sound files - some about 10 minutes in length, many others a few seconds; I’ll be adding the longer audio files 2 - 3 times a month. I’m pleased with my hosting at WPengine, except that I can’t use the staging functionality, as sound files aren’t brought over when you bring a staging site live.
Does anyone have ideas or recommendations about where to place the mp3 files? I’m looking at Soundcloud, but would prefer to have just the default playback bar, not the waveform-ish look Soundcloud provides.
Hi Curt,
While there are plenty of options available for hosting video, there are surprisingly few options for hosting audio.
If you don't want to upload and host the audio files on your own web server, SoundCloud is by far the most popular option.
BUT, since you don't like the look of their embedded player with the visible representation of the audio waveform, you'll need a slightly more complicated solution.
The short version is to first upload and host your audio files on Amazon S3, then use the WordPress shortcode to embed them on your site. Here's how.
The Audio shortcode in WordPress looks like this:
[audio src="path-to-audio-file"]
You can replace the source (src) with any URL to a hosted audio file. So once you've uploaded your audio files to Amazon S3, you can copy the public URL to that file, then use it to construct an embedded audio player on your WordPress site.
More about the Audio Shortcode here:https://codex.wordpress.org/Audio_Shortcode
Of course, this greatly complicates the process. So you might be better off continuing to upload your audio files to your WP Engine-hosted web server until it really becomes an issue with bandwidth and/or billing.
Hope this helps!
Thanks Shawn, that’s really helpful!
I’ll tinker with Soundcloud a little more, but it sounds like sticking with the basics of uploading to WP Engine makes sense for now.