I had been looking for a decent player for a client’s website and tried quite a few until I came across WordPress Audio Player. The plugin was developed by Martin Laine It is currently on version 2.0 beta 6. The plugin WILL work in WordPress 2.8.6.

To install, you can simply look up ‘WordPress Audio Player’ in your WordPress admin under Plugins> Add New or go to the WordPress Plugin directory and download so you can manual install.

One of the issues I came across and this was actually something that came up in the WordPress forum is the fact that the player might not show up or the following message was seen in place of where the player was suppose to be:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

To remedy this, I simply added the following snippet of code in my header.php file of my theme before the body tag.


<?php wp_head(); ?>


and the following in footer before the ending body tag.


<?php wp_footer(); ?>


After that, the player worked great.

One other issue noted was that you could not properly insert the image from your WordPress admin panel. Although you could upload your audio file to your Media gallery, inserting the file was not working. I resorted to manually inserting the file, which was really easy to do.

Example:
[audio:your-audio-file-name.mp3]

You can insert single files or multiple files and it works great. Other than a few kinks to work out, I find this plugin very useful and recommend it.

Have you tried WordPress Audio Player out? What do you think?