Notes on sound design

There are two ways to put audio on a blog, and they are good at different things.

Self-hosted

If you have the file, serve it yourself. You keep control, there is no third-party tracking, and it works offline once cached.

The trade-off is bandwidth. Audio and video are heavy, so keep an eye on your host’s limits if you do this a lot.

Third-party

For anything on a streaming platform, an embed is cheaper to run and gives listeners controls they already know.

Picking

• Original recordings you want to keep forever: self-host.
• A track that already lives on a platform: embed it.
• Both at once: do both, with the embed as a fallback.