How To Add Audio To Your eBay Listing

Adding audio to your eBay listing is a great way to describe your product in your own words to your potential bidders. It will increase your credibility and enable you to build a rapport with you bidders.

Unfortunately eBay will not host your audio files on their web site so you will need to have your own web site. You can easily use free hosting for this.

The simplest way is to record your audio using the windows sound recorder, upload the wav file to your web site then create a link in your eBay listing to the wav file. This is probably not the best way as wav files can be quite large and they need to be downloaded before they can be played.

A better way is to use mp3 format. Either convert your wav file into mp3 (free converters can be found on the net) or record in mp3 format. I use Audacity which can also be found on the net. Mp3 files can be 10 times smaller than wav files so they won't take so long to download.

If you really want your eBay listing to look and sound professional you can add a Flash Audio button. Using one of the programs reviewed on Website Audio Reviews you can upload the flash files to your web site and paste the html code into your listing.

How To Send Audio Emails

Audio files are normally too large to send via email. Servers will bounce or block your emails if they are larger than a few megabytes. Also if you are sending an audio email to a friend with a slow Internet connection you don't want to clog up their computer downloading your large email.
So one way to overcome this is to create a simple web page or audio postcard, with your audio button on it and email your friend a link to your new audio postcard page.
If you are really in a hurry and don't want to create a web page take a look at this free new service which allows you to send audio or video emails directly. http://www.springdoo.com/

Is every host able to accomodate audio?

If you are using Flash for your audio any standard hosting company should be able to accomodate you. Only if you are using RealAudio will you need to get a dedicated streaming server.

Will Audio Require an Increased Hosting Bandwidth?

MP3 or SWF files sizes are around 1MB per minute of audio for resonable quality. Therefore if you have a 10 minutes of audio on your website and you get 10,000 visitors per month the bandwidth required for your audio would be 10MB x 10,000 = 100GB.
My hosting company charge $5.75 per month for 300GB per month bandwidth. Any additional bandwidth costs $1 per month per 4GB. If I start to exceed my bandwidth I will consider another hosting company (some can provide upto 1,000GB bandwidth per month for less then $8.00 per month) or a monthly audio service like Audio Generator.
Work out how much audio you are going to use and estimate your number of visitors and you can then work out your bandwidth requirements. Don't forget to allow for bandwidth for your web pages and images.
If necessary you can reduce the size of your audio files by decreasing the bit rate but this will reduce the quality of the sound.

Post Your Questions About Web Audio

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If you have a question about adding audio to your web site please click on the link below, ask your question and I will post an answer on this blog within a few days.
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