1. You upload a new file to your Media Library;
2. WP Offload Media copies the file to your storage service;
3. when WordPress requests that file, the resource will be loaded from the storage service instead of your local server;
4. optionally, after the uploading process completes, you can configure the offloading plugin to remove the actual file from from your local server, so it doesn’t take up any space

If you want to learn more about how you can configure WP Offload Media with your website, I would recommend you read the following guides:

• Amazon S3 Quick Start Guide
• Digital Ocean Quick Start Guide
• Google Cloud Storage Quick Start Guide
• Wasabi Quick Start Guide

How to proceed:

1. Go to your Media Library
2. Click on any audio file. If you are using the List view, you can skip to step 4
3. In the Audio Details dialog that pops up, click on the link Edit more details
4. In the post editor, you can change any details of the audio file, like you do to any other post or page: click on the “Set Featured Image” and choose the image you want to use as a thumbnail for this audio track.

After completing this process, that specific audio file will have the selected picture as a thumbnail in any instance of WavePlayer.

Alternatively, it is possible to embed the cover art picture in the MP3 file before uploading it to the Media Library. When you do so, WordPress extracts the cover art picture from the audio file, adds it to the Media Library and attaches it as a featured image to the audio file it extracted the picture from, without any further action from the user.

For external files that are hosted remotely and used in your websites, WavePlayer is even capable of extracting the cover art picture from the MP3 file (if any) and use it anywhere the track is used on the website.

Please consider that, due to most web server limitations, WavePlayer cannot generate preview files from the downloadable files. That is something you have to do yourself, uploading separate files for download and for preview.

If you want to learn how to add preview files to your products, you can read our knowledge base article about working with WooCommerce.

We tested WavePlayer with tens of WooCommerce themes, both Free and Premiums, and the WooCommerce integration worked out of the box with the vast majority of them. Some themes, though, use various forms of customization that might require some extra actions. For example, a CSS rule of the theme could prevent an element in the player to display correctly. If you are not familiar with coding, we would recommend you to CONTACT US and we will do our best to point you in the right direction in fixing your issues.

WavePlayer also stores the peak files for remotely hosted audio files. In that case, instead of a simple peak file, it saves an info file that, in addition to the peak information, includes also all the ID3 tags extracted from the audio file during the analysis. This way, even when remotely hosted files are used, you can take advantage of instantaneous waveform rendering.

Of course, also a higher bitrate will affect the time required to generate a waveform.

Nevertheless, any media content that is accessible by the browser is literally downloaded to the device of the visitor. No matter what technique you try to implement on your website, the final result is always that the browser must access the media file in order to read it, show it or play it back. That exposes the media file to the possibility of easily being downloaded by any visitor.

Downloading a file would be relatively easy for any visitor with a fair knowledge of how a website works and how to use the browser developer tools. If you have an eCommerce website that sells audio (music, sound effects, podcast episodes, etc), we recommend to never use the purchasable audio file as a preview file. A plugin such as WooCommerce protects the purchasable files in a special folder that is not accessible by the browser. That restriction makes it also not playable by any player because the browser would get a 403 error. In that case, the approach we suggest is creating a separate file to be used as a preview file. The preview file could be:

• a shorter version of the purchasable file (like on Amazon or iTunes)
• a file encoded in much lower bitrate (if your purchasable file are WAV 24 bit @ 48.kHz, your preview files could be 128 kB MP3 files)
• a watermarked version of the purchasable file (like on AudioJungle)