[Plugin: Audio Player] AVOID this plugin. Read this!

Please do not use this plugin. There are half a dozen far superiour plugins in the .org repository. Any plugin that has HTML5 support is automatically better. You can read below for more details, but the bottom line is just don’t use this.

I’ve had a client who has been running this for awhile now (years) and this plugin was installed before I took over the site.

When we started development of his new site, I spent some time investigating the plugins to try and see which ones should be replace/removed. Needless to say, this plugin is a no-go.

I’m really not sure where to start.

– The fact that this plugin has not been updated in 2 years should be a warning sign.

– This plugin only supports flash with no fallback (hello 2008). So if you care at all about visitors on mobile/non-flash devices, this isn’t for you.

– Instead of using the WordPress add_shortcode() function, for whatever reason the author decided to write his own (I guess to support excerpts, but who wants an audio player in their excerpt?). In a nut shell, this plugin reads the output on every single post and excerpt trying to see if the content contains [audio]. That’s not resource intensive at all! There is a reason you shouldn’t do this.

– This plugin loads/outputs js/files on nearly every single page, regardless of if you are actually using the audio shortcode or not. So if you are using the shortcode on 10% of your site, the other 90% still loads the audio files. This is not acceptable anymore, actually this was never acceptable.

I could go on and on, but after going through the code, trust me when I say this plugin is doing_it_wrong(). Do yourself a favor and pick a audio plugin that supports HTML5 and is developed by someone who 1) knows WordPress and it’s coding standards 2) updates the plugin.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/audio-player/