Can You Hear Me Now?

I'll start off by admitting I'm no website guru. I know very little about HTML coding, style sheets and all the rest of the stuff it takes to make a website properly work. 

For voice over pros, your website is today's version of the demo CD. In this digital age most producers, agencies and recording studios don't want a a physical CD of your best work. They want a digital file they can easily listen to and, perhaps, store on their computer for easy reference. A physical CD, in most minds, is nothing more than a coaster to prevent their Starbucks latte from leaving a ring on their desk. 

I'm not going to dwell on actual website design because, as I said, I'm no coding genius. And my site is definitely not an award winner. Your site needs to look professional but don't dwell on fancy graphics or effects. Prospective clients aren't there to hire a web designer. You need to make sure your demos are easily found and, most importantly, they "play".

The "play" aspect was my Achilles heel when I jumped into this business full-time. I'm a Windows user and admittedly know virtually nothing about iOS (iPads and Macs). So, I didn't realize that the Flash based player I embedded on my site to play my demos wouldn't work for any client using iOS. And, to make matters worse, most "creative types" use Macs or iPads in their work. They followed the link to my site but couldn't play my demos. So my "Hi, my voice will be perfect for you" mass mailing fell, literally, on deaf ears. Just wonderful!

I needed to find a player to embed on my site that worked with all the major web browsers; Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Making the task even more daunting, the player had to work with all versions. An example of that is Firefox. It wasn't until very recently that Firefox could play .mp3 files. However, you can't depend on every Firefox user to upgrade to the latest version. So the player had to be backward compatible.

I'm certain there are better ways than what worked for me. I found a few cross-platform players that required inserting code, but the web editor I used doesn't seem to allow pasting in Windows for some reason. And the lines of code were rather long to manually type (call me lazy).

Anyway, here's what worked for me. It combines two players in one, so it's compatible with everything tried. I used every Windows browser and had a friend try it on his Mac and iPad.

<div>
<object data="http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/ui/3523697345-audio-player.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="380" height="27">
<param name="src" value="http://reader.googleusercontent.com/reader/ui/3523697345-audio-player.swf" />
<param name="FlashVars" value="audioUrl=URL_PATH_TO_THE_MP3_FILE" />
<audio src="URL_PATH_TO_THE_MP3_FILE" controls preload="none" style="width:380px;"></audio>
</object>
</div>

What this code does is play your demos with the Google Reader MP3 Player, which is Flash based.  However, for browsers that don't/can't use Flash (I see you iOS) is uses HTML5 code called <audio>. Now they can hear you!  

As I said, there are probably more efficient ways or better ways.  But this worked just fine for me.  Now it's on to the studio to make some rockin' new demos.