I had a particular post in mind with a relevant song.

See here > Adding Audio Files to Your Blog http://en.support.wordpress.com/audio/

And, you're welcome.

On your advice I'll steer clear. Thanks.

Please note: autoplay is a major irritant for some people (myself included). Many of us are already listening to music of our own choosing. And many of us will click out never to return again if we experience someone else's musical taste when clicking in as have not been given an option to listen or not. I never return to such blogs.

Please note: autoplay is a major irritant for some people (myself included). Many of us will click out never to return again if we experience someone else's musical taste and have not been given an option to listen or not. I never return to such blogs.

Consider that people may be viewing at work, or while someone is sleeping. Maybe they have other music playing in the background or are running a web video or any number of other reasons.

Please note: autoplay is a major irritant for some people (myself included). Many of us will click out never to return again if we experience someone else's musical taste and have not been given an option to listen or not. I never return to such blogs.

Okay, then if I give visitors the option to click the imbedded url, how do I keep the person from being redirected from my site to the website (say, youtube) that I upload the audio file to?

In other words, how do I make it so that the audio-file-url loads from *my* site?

No, you REALLY don't want to do that. It much better to allow the visitor to select whether or not they want to listen to your music.

Many people will simply never return to a site that uses autoplay.

The WordPress player does not provide autoplay music. You can try an alternative player: http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/alternative-audio-players/

Please note: autoplay is a major irritant for some people (myself included). Many of us will click out never to return again if we experience someone else's musical taste and have not been given an option to listen or not. I never return to such blogs.

Please note: autoplay is a major irritant for some people (myself included). Many of us will click out never to return again if we experience someone else's musical taste and have not been given an option to listen or not. I never return to such blogs.

You're helping me tremendously by giving me definitive answers to questions that it would have taken me hours of experimentation to work out.

In a few minutes I'm going to present the possibility of a simple splash page (no animation, just logo, music player, and link to enter the site) with out automatic redirect, and see if that appeals.

I may go back to looking for other themes, but the look of oxygen is so clean and modern, and I love the slider. But if you can recommend something that might work better, I'm very open to input.

Thank you!

If you switched to WordPress.org, then you would have complete control of the code and you could actually modify the showcase template to add in a home page only section—or better yet, add homepage only widget areas.

I'll do my best to help you push the limits of WordPress.com though, and I hope you stick around and try working within the boundaries. I think AYS is really cool and I like the idea of having it on WordPress.com. Are you certain the organization won't budge on the home page music autoplay issue? Have you considered trying out user testing about autoplay to show whether people like it as a feature or not?

I know this question is off the original topic, but am I able to automatically redirect from a splash page to the true home page?

I posted this in the body of the would-be splash page:
<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="15";url=http://www.aystest.wordpress.com">

But the editor removed it.

Maybe I should start a new topic for this...

Thanks again!

If you must use a splash page, my advice would be to make it load extremely fast to avoid the common sentiment that intros are annoying.

I'm looking at maybe making the home page a splash page with a photo, logo or slideshow and the music player only. Seems a little redundant with such a visual showcase as the main page, but it keeps the auto playing audio player out of the functional area of the site.

Any advice for someone wanting to create a simple, attractive splash page?

Again, thank you so much!

I was able to hide it on the home page but adding an additional rule, BUT the music still plays because the code is still loaded even though the widget is hidden from display. So it's a bust!

.home #text-7 {
	display: block;
}

Oxygen together with the showcase template just isn't going to let you post an shortcode on the homepage only. I think you could use some of the ideas we talked about above on a different theme though.

I'll also throw in support for the idea of not using autoplay at all. Even though the symphony music is beautiful, having an autoplay element below the fold on the home page is extremely annoying to me personally. Think about repeat visitors too. If your client wants to keep autoplay music on the home page, I would very much recommend placing it at the top perhaps in the left sidebar instead of the bottom in the footer so that visitors can turn it off if it's startling or adjust the sound if it's too loud.