I was just playing around with the Audio Player plugin for my first podcast. On the day of the post, I was a bit nervous, because I’ve never done a podcast before, and I didn’t know how it would look in an RSS feed reader.

So I subscribed to my own feed to make sure. It was a good thing I did. At the appointed time, I awaited eagerly, earnestly, even ecstatically. No post in my feed reader. Oh no. Ok, maybe FeedBurner was a little slow. So I waited a little longer.

60 agonising minutes later, I checked my feed again. No post! What happened? Turns out the options settings for the plugin were differently set for what I had in mind. I wanted a flash player for every audio file in the post, and I’ll manually provide a link for downloading it.

And what did I do? I set it such that it appears in a post but not in a feed. As a DIC member would say, “I am stupid”.

Quickly, I set things right. First, in the WordPress “Options” panel, under “Audio Player”, I set the following

I checked the “Replace syntax” and the “Enclosure integration” options.

Then I set these

This was the crucial one. There were two other selections for the dropdownlist, “Download link” and “Nothing”. Since I’m setting anchor links myself, and I wasn’t sure about “Custom”, I just set it to “Nothing”. I thought it meant the player or audio file won’t appear in the feed. Big wrong assumption. It literally meant nothing would be shown. Not a sound, not a word, not a letter, not even a full stop. As far as syndication was concerned, the post didn’t even exist. Just set this to “Custom” and you should be fine.

I saved all the settings, and checked my feed. All was well.

There were two audio files in that post, and I also found out only one can be enclosured (meaning only one is displayed at the end of a post), although more audio files (in the form of anchor links) can be included. Luckily, the first one I inserted in the post was the one I wanted.