I want .mp3s in my sidebar, not in my posts.

April 7, 2009 6:20 PM

Best Wordpress music solutions for artists?

There's a previous question about this, but it's not exactly the same situation and it's over two years old, so I figured I'd throw this out there.

I'm in a band, I have a website, I'm not a web developer. I discovered Wordpress recently and it's been a godsend, allowing a codeless wonder like myself to achieve a high degree of customization with showing images, concert dates, venue information, etc. The problem is playing music.

Ideally I would like to install a plugin with widget support that will present a music player with album covers, track information, links, etc. I'd like to draw all this info from a site that specializes in presenting it, like last.fm or bandcamp. The music player on any band's myspace page is just about the right size/shape/info density for what I'd like.

Last.fm For Artists is a Wordpress widget, but it only supplies top track info and tour stuff that I'm handling elsewhere. Last.fm has a few Wordpress widgets that actually play music, but they're geared toward fans.

Bandcamp offers a player you can export into Wordpress, but I'm only able to use it by putting it into a text widget, which requires some futzing with the code and has kind of an awkward appearance with a drop-down menu that craps all over the box it's in. It appears that almost every piece of code written to put .mp3s into Wordpress is all about putting them into posts, which is where I don't want them - I want them in a sidebar widget.

I'm at the point where I'm seriously considering shoving a generic flash mp3 player into a text widget, manually messing with all its properties to try and make it look OK, and playing tunes from my own server. I don't want to do this! Don't get me wrong, CSS is cool and I'm enjoying all the new skills I'm learning, but surely I'm not the first band guy who has ever tried to do this.

So, what am I overlooking? An easy, attractive widget-based flash mp3 player plugin that will draw music from my own server? A bandcamp or last.fm like site that offers Wordpress widget integration? Something else? Do I really have to re-invent the wheel? Hope me.

posted by arcanecrowbar to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

I'm sure this isn't exactly what you're looking for, but if you mess around with the CSS a bit you could make it look nicer. Yahoo has a great player that is really easy to add to your site. It adds a flash player to any links to mp3 files on a page, and will automatically assemble the links into a playlist. If you style it right, and add the album art yourself, it could do what you're looking for. You can see it in action here, though I imagine you want to present it differently. I help I've hoped you.
posted by daboo at 9:03 PM on April 7, 2009

Best answer: Check out ReverbNation. I don't know specifically about a WP-friendly music player widget, but I haven't had any trouble embedding it into a number of websites.

They also have a Facebook version. I'm in 3 bands and I can mix&match tracks from all of them in a player on the sidebar of my FB page.
posted by omnidrew at 8:11 AM on April 8, 2009

Response by poster: The ReverbNation player looks to be just the ticket . . thanks!
posted by arcanecrowbar at 3:32 PM on April 8, 2009