Adding Music to your Music Page
From HostBaby Wiki
The Music page is a wonderful tool for letting your audience hear your music online! There are multiple options available to you. You can allow audience members to:
- download the full length of your songs.
- stream the full length of your songs without making them available for download.
- stream short clips of your songs (the wizard lets you choose start and end times, and adds a nice fade in and fade out on both ends!)
But, before any of that is possible, the first step is uploading your files. So here's how to do that:
First, go to http://yourdomain.com/hostbaby (replacing yourdomain.com with your actual domain.) Log in, click on Website, then Music You'll see a screen that looks like this:
To add a new song to your music page, click ADD NEW. That will take you to the following page where you can enter the Title, Artist and Lyrics for the song. Artist will be pre-filled for you based on the information you added in your Basic Info section. You can, however, change this to anything you wish.
Once you've filled out the form to your satisfaction, click ADD. That will take you to the next page, where you will add your audio file:
To upload your file, click on the Browse button. That will pop open a window to your computer that you can use to navigate to the music file you wish to upload. Acceptable formats are mp3, Wav and Flac. Generally the *best* bet is to upload the highest quality mp3 file that you have. The wizard converts the other files to mp3 anyway
My file is on my desktop, so I simply highlight the song I wish to upload, and click Open. (Your visual experience may differ slightly on a PC, but the overall function will be the same.)
Once You've selected your music file, you will be dropped back into your wizard administration page, which will now be filled in with the path to the file on your computer. Click upload. Be prepared to wait a while, especially if you're on a slower connection, or uploading a larger file (big mp3, or any wav/flac files.) It can take anywhere from 5 seconds to 5 minutes, depending on the above. Don't assume you're done. When your file has been successfully uploaded, you will be forwarding to the page shown below, with a bright yellow "UPLOADED" bar at the top, as shown:
From there, you can begin to choose your audio presentation.
It is our recommendation that, if you are an artist attempting to sell your music on your website, that you either do ONLY short-clips, or that you choose one song to give away for free and make the rest short clips. After all, what incentive is there to purchase music when one can hear it any time they like by going to your website? Also, while doing streaming audio is a measure of protection against someone stealing your audio files, it's not fool-proof. Anything that can be heard via your computer's speakers can be recorded from its hard drive by those who know how to do so. They'd have to want it pretty badly, but it's possible. SO: Short Clips are the way to go for the most part. But we'll show you how to do everything.
First -- Let's just choose full-length streaming audio in Lo-Fi and Hi-Fi:
As you can see above, all you do is put a check in the corresponding boxes and hit the 'click here when done' box. You'll know it's done when you see the "UPDATED" bar again:
Now, to make short clips. Scroll down past the top portion to the bit that says "Short Sound Clip." Choose your start time from the first dropdown, and your end time from the second, and click the "Choose these clip times" button.
You'll note that after you click the "Choose these clip times" button, the page will refresh and you'll have 5 options at the top of the page instead of the standard 3. To choose to use short clips, make sure no other options are checked, and check the "mp3 short clip lo-fi play" and "mp3 short clip hi-fi play" options, and click the "Click here when done button.
When you're done, that will bounce you back to the music page with your song now listed:
And that's it! Our next tutorial will show you how to use grouping on the music page to list your songs by album or genre. :)
