UPDATE: Sorry to say, friends, it appears that the below instructions have been outmoded. It was a good run while it lasted, but we all know how quickly all things technological evolve. Weirdly, however, WordPress still hasn’t made it easier for mopes like us to embed the Lala player, or something comparable. So it goes. I hope to troubleshoot this all over again, but not sure when I’ll be able to do so. If you’re interested, subscribe via email or RSS to this blog, and stay tuned.
I’m happy to report cLm.wordpress now has streaming audio. You’ll find the Lala Music Forecast Lala Playlist widget to the right, and it’s easy enough to use. Hit the gray play button to listen to the songs beginning to end.
For five days following your initial play, you’ll be able to listen to each song once for free. On the sixth day, you’ll have register (also gratis) with Lala to continue using the player. There’s no credit card required or any of that. It’s still one play per song, but I’ll attempt to keep the songs fresh, so you’ll always have music to listen to. Should you want to purchase an unlimited stream or MP3 of a song, Lala offers those options as well. Click here to read Pitchfork‘s explanation.
WordPress bloggers: Getting the Lala Forecast* widget functioning isn’t easy and I imagine I’m not alone in trying to figure it out. Here’s how I did it.
- In Lala, pull down “My Lala” and click on “Profile”
- Click “Embed this” above the Forecast box and copy the HTML
- Start a free Clearspring account, and click “Use the In-Widget API”
- Enter a name for your widget and click “Save”
- On the next page, click “Edit Your Widget,” then “Content Template”
- Paste your Lala HTML code into the “Widget Content” box
- Set width to 150, height to 345, and click “Save”
- Click the “Publish” tab along the top, then “API Info”
- On the next page, copy the WID string [ex: 5a141h4be8f4f322]
- In your WordPress dashboard, create a “Text” widget
- Name the widget, and in the box enter the following in brackets: clearspring_widget title=”YOUR WIDGET NAME” wid=”YOUR WID STRING” width=”150″ height=”345″ domain=”widgets.clearspring.com”
- Did it work?
*You can embed a Lala Playlist widget by grabbing the HTML code from the “Share” option within the playlist view, then adjust width and height (in the places mentioned above and in the HTML) to fit your sidebar.
Chris Writes Things 
Lala will be shut down at the end of May by its newish Apple overlords:
http://changingway.org/2010/04/30/lala-may-shutdown/
Chris: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. The one on your site works well — and looks good. So, there has to be a way — unless they just shut it down. I’ll hollar back here if I ever do figure it out. Take care.
Yeah, this doesn’t work anymore. At least I can’t get it to — and I’m fairly tech savy. Step three is the problem. When going to create a “clearspring” account it just keeps pushing you to sign up for a “share button” add-this thing. Ugh.
Okay, well thanks for letting me know. I updated the article above to let newcomers know the deal. If you figure it out, gimme a shout… My player still plays, which leads me to believe there’s a way to make it work within the new system.
oh man, i wish i was even half advanced enough to figure it out for myself. who knew setting up a simple media player could be so complicated. maybe i should just pay for the extra Wrdprss storage (i think that allows one to share music)? btw, this is the only blog with instructions for this so even though it didn’t work PROPS!
Hey Gumshoe… I’m not positive, but I think the “AddThis” designation is new. I don’t recall it being called that. Which leads me to believe other elements may have been altered as well. If you figure it out, please let me know. I’d be happy to link out to an amended “how-to.”
argh, i can’t seem to find the pages you specify now that i’ve started a “clearspring” account (which is just AddThis, right?) … did you mean an AddThis account?
FWIW, I finally got it to work! It seems that the problem was the quotation marks in the code. When I deleted them and replaced them, it worked.
Cheers
I’ve tried it a couple times, but keep getting “No content define”
Any ideas?
Nice work. It worked in mine, though i adjusted the width a bit to fit the sidebar to my liking.
Great to hear. Yeah, I realize that the dimensions may need to be modified based on people’s themes and preferences. Just checked out your page — looks awesome.