Put Music Playlist on Tumblr

Tumblr, which was recently aquired by Yahoo, has an enthusiastic user base whether you're blogging about art, social issues or music. When you want to share your favorite music on Tumblr, you have two options: use Tumblr's built-in audio post service to share posts directly to your follower's dashboard or embed an external audio player on your blog. Tumblr doesn't offer a default option for embedding music on your blog.

• Audio Posts

  1. If you want to share a playlist via a Tumblr post, your only option is to use an audio post. Audio posts on Tumblr allow you to share music from a variety of sources, including your own MP3 files and Spotify. To share a playlist, you can share a personal playlist from Spotify or you can include a "Set" from SoundCloud, which is basically a playlist. With both services, if you make changes to the playlist, your audio post will reflect those changes. It may take a few minutes for these changes to show up in your post.

• Audio on Your Tumblr Sidebar

  1. If you want to include a music player on the sidebar for your Tumblr blog, you can do so by pasting the code for an external player in the "Description" section of your blog's customization page. You can copy the embed code for a SoundCloud set and paste it to add the set playlist to your sidebar. The Spotify Play Button offers a similar widget that you can add to your sidebar. Like with your audio posts, these will change when you make changes to your playlist. You can also use the HTML5 audio tag, which uses a basic audio player interface. For this, you will need an externally-hosted URL for your file and you will need to change it manually when you want to hear something different.

• Adding a Bar-Style Audio Player

  1. Several external music players appear as a small bar on the top or bottom of the page instead of in the sidebar. One option is the SCM Music Player, which allows you to use an RSS feed, SoundCloud set or YouTube playlist for your audio. You can also upload your own files and set the playlist to random so that visitors never hear the same songs when they press play. SCM is an open-source project; the code for it is used in WikiPlayer, which expanded on the original source to add more features. For both players, you must click the "Edit HTML" button on your blog customization page and paste the script for the music player below the opening body tag in your theme.

• Problems with Embedded Music

  1. While sharing your enthusiasm for music is great, use caution -- poorly handled music players may cause your visitors to leave. Never set your audio player to start automatically, as most users don't want to be accosted by music unexpectedly when browsing. Be aware that adding audio players slows down your website, both due to users streaming audio and because the browser has to load additional scripts. If the music player breaks, it may cause malfunctions on your blog.

Posted in: Blogging