Sillybean

Audio

Uploading audio is fairly straightforward, too: choose the file, and you’ll be asked to fill in the title, description, caption, and link URL. When you press Insert into post, a link to your audio file will appear. If you’re not thrilled with this low-tech approach, take a look at the popular Audio Player plugin, which replaces links to MP3 files with a simple Flash player interface.

Figure 4-37. Audio Player replaces links to .mp3 files with a Flash-based player.

Podcasting

Podcasting with WordPress is relatively easy. If you’ve inserted your audio file into your post (even as a simple link), WordPress will automatically add the proper enclosures to your feeds. However, if you want to include your podcast in the iTunes podcast directory, you’ll need a plugin to configure some additional fields for your feed. PodPress reigned supreme among podcasting plugins for quite some time, but was abandoned by its developers and doesn’t work with recent versions of WordPress. Podcasting is the best plugin currently available. If you’d like to manage more than one podcast using categories, the Podcast Channels plugin will configure the additional feeds necessary.

Tip: The various podcasting plugins work for both audio and video podcasts.