Nick Halsey

<p>WordPress supports featured images out of the box, allowing images to represent posts in various ways defined by the theme. This plugin adds similar support for audio, allowing musicians, podcasters, and anyone who publishes audio with WordPress to feature audio files on posts and pages in a structured way. Each post and page gets a featured audio metabox where an audio file can be uploaded or selected from the media library.</p>
<p>By default, featured audio is displayed at the top of posts and pages <code>(within the_content)</code>. Developers can change this by adding theme support for <code>featured-audio</code>, via several API functions listed below.</p>
<p>Why use featured audio instead of embeding audio directly into posts? Featured audio organizes the content in a structured way, alowing infinite possibilities to customize the way users experience audio content on your site. The plugin ships with one example of this – the featured audio playlist widget. Add this widget to your sidebar and it’ll automatically display a playlist of all of the audio files featured on posts shown on the current view, on views with more than one post such as the main blog page or a category page. The plugin also supports a recent audio playlist widget, which behaves similarly to a latest posts widget.</p>
<p>For a more comprehensive way to manage <em>music</em> with WordPress, particularly if you need to include sheet music alongisde audio, see the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/sheet-music-library/" rel="ugc">Sheet Music Library</a> plugin.</p>
<h3>Developer API Functions</h3>
<h4>Add Theme Support</h4>
<pre><code>add_theme_support( 'featured-audio' )
</code></pre>
<p>Adding theme support for featured audio tells the plugin not to add the featured audio to the content automatically. Instead, you can add featured audio exactly where you want it with <code>the_featured_content()</code> (see below for details).</p>
<h4>Change Supported Post Types</h4>
<p>By default, the <code>post</code> and <code>page</code> post types are supported. You can use the <code>featured_audio_post_types</code> filter to modify this list. For example:</p>
<pre><code>add_filter( 'featured_audio_post_types', 'prefix_featured_audio_post_types' );
function prefix_featured_audio_post_types( $post_types ) {
    // Add support to the sheet_music post type.
    $post_types[] = 'sheet_music';

    // Overwrite the entire list to remove support on pages.
    $post_types = array( 'post' );

    return $post_types;
}
</code></pre>
<h4>the_featured_audio( $args )</h4>
<p>Display the featured audio, if it exists.</p>
<p>Parameters:</p>
<pre><code>$args                   array   Display options.
$args['id']             int     Post id (optional). Defaults to current post id. 
$args['album_art']      boolean Whether to display the album art for the featured audio cycle. Default: false.
$args['album_art_size'] string  Size to use for the album art picture. Default: thumbnail.
$args['title']          boolean Whether to display the title of the audio attachment. Default: false.
</code></pre>
<h4>get_the_featured_audio( $args )</h4>
<p>Get the featured audio, if it exists, as a string. Has the same arguments as <code>the_featured_audio()</code>.</p>
<h4>get_featured_audio_src( $id )</h4>
<p>Returns the url of the featured audio file, if it exists.</p>
<p>Parameter:</p>
<pre><code>$id int Post id (optional). Defaults to current post id.
</code></pre>
<h4>get_featured_audio_attachment_id( $id )</h4>
<p>Returns the id of the featured audio attachment, if it exists.</p>
<p>Parameter:</p>
<pre><code>$id int Post id (optional). Defaults to current post id.
</code></pre>
<h4>get_the_featured_audio_playlist()</h4>
<p>Get the featured audio playlist, if there are multiple posts with featured audio in the current query. Used by the featured audio playlist widget.</p>
<h4>the_featured_audio_playlist()</h4>
<p>Displays (echoes) <code>get_the_featured_audio_playlist()</code>.</p>


Featured Audio

Add featured audio to your posts and pages, like featured images.

Play.ht

<p>Play.ht helps you convert your articles, blog posts, courses and almost all written content into spoken word audio so users can listen to your content. Play.ht uses state of the art Text to Speech technology and SEO friendly embedded audio players along with RSS podcast feeds to help you create, embed and distribute your articles in audio format.</p>
<p>Giving users an option to listen to your content offers several benefits such as it makes your content more accessible to busy on-the-go users, it helps people with visual disabilities to consume your content and when people listen on your website they spend more time thereby increase user engagement and page on time metrics of your website which improves your SEO.</p>
<p>Play.ht also enables you to create RSS feeds of your audio articles that you can submit to iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts to publish your articles as podcasts on these platforms thereby increasing the reach of your content.</p>
<p>With more than 260+ high-quality realistic AI Text to Speech voices in 55+ different languages powered by Google Wavenet, Amazon Polly, Microsoft Azure and IBM Watson, you get the largest collection of best and natural sounding AI Voices to choose from to narrate your content.</p>
<p>Use from 3 different types of fully customizable and white-labeled embedded audio players to offer the best listening experience for your audience.</p>
<p>You also get access to detailed audio analytics which shows listening behavior of your users.</p>
<p>When users listen to your articles, they have the ability to increase or reduce the listening speed, share the audio on social media, download or even subscribe with their emails.</p>
<h3>Features</h3>
<p>These are some of the features this plugin provides:</p>
<ol>
<li>Increases accessibility and user engagement of your content using 260+ high-quality Text to Speech AI voices.</li>
<li>Converts articles, blog posts, lessons, courses, etc. into spoken word audio narrations so users have the option of listening.</li>
<li>Increases the time users spend on your website thereby increasing Time on Page metrics and reduces Bounce rates.</li>
<li>Provides easy shareability of your articles as audio on Twitter & Facebook.</li>
<li>Enables you to publish your articles and blog posts as Podcasts on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.</li>
<li>Get detailed audio analytics of your audio.</li>
<li>A state of the art Text to Voice editor to help with editing audio of your articles.</li>
</ol>


Play.ht – Make Your Blog Posts Accessible With Text to Speech Audio

Increase content accessibility, user engagement and time on page metrics by converting your posts to audio.

Featured Audio vs Play.ht – Make Your Blog Posts Accessible With Text to Speech Audio