THE CITY IN LITERATURE: Embedding Audio in Blogger

Once you have finished your project in Audacity and exported as an mp3, save the file on your computer in a place you will remember later.

(If you are NOT working on one of the school computers, you may need to download an "encoder" for Audacity that allows you to export as an mp3. Audacity, though, should walk you through this step by step when you try to export, if that is the case. Here is a help page nonetheless. The plugin is called the LAME mp3 encoder.)

The next step is to "host" the file online somewhere. You need to do this in order to generate a URL for embedding purposes within Blogger. I use DropBox:

In DropBox, I can save my audio file to a public folder that will allow me to generate a URL:

Alternatively, you can use your SSTX file server account. In each account is folder called public_html. If you put a file called austinlandscape.mp3 into your public_html folder, the public URL is:

http://spartans.sstx.org/~yourusername/austinlandscape.mp3

(Note: yourusername above is your user name.)

There are a number of ways to embed a music player in Blogger. all of them require using the "Edit HTML" rather than "Compose" mode.

You can paste the HTML code into your page, simply replacing URL in the example with your own.

Here is the HTML for my washer mockumentary:

<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3523697345-audio-player.swf?audioUrl=http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17407226/Washer%20Mockumentary.mp3" height="27" width="320"></embed>

Here's the HTML with the bolded caps indicating where you own music file URL would go:

<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3523697345-audio-player.swf?audioUrl=YOUR AUDIO FILE HERE" height="27" width="320"></embed>

Once you publish your page with this embed code, it should look something like this:

This player should work cross-platform, meaning that it shouldn't matter if you are using a Mac or a pC. Some HTML audio embed codes won't be so universal.