A Compact WP Audio Player Plugin that is compatible with all major browsers and devices (Android, iPhone, iPad)
As of April 2026, Compact WP Audio Player is a WordPress audio plugin with 20K+ active installations and a 4.1/5 rating from 68 reviews. It has been downloaded 662K+ times in total. Requires WordPress 5.0+ and PHP false+. Available on WordPress.org since 2013. Downloads are down 20% this week. Top alternative: The Ultimate Video Player For WordPress….
Compact WordPress Audio Player plugin is an HTML5 + Flash hybrid based wordpress plugin which can be used to embed an mp3 audio file on your WordPress post or page using a shortcode. The audio player is cute and compact and will play on all major browsers.
This audio player plugin Supports .mp3 and .ogg file formats.
The audio files that you embed using this plugin will work on all devices.
Really love this plug in! I wanted exactly this – just a single, simple button, alternating between play and pause, allowing people to play or not as they saw fit, linking to an audio file in the back bedroom. And suddenly, there it was! And even I, a floundering newbie, managed to get it into my (Astra) footer without too much stumbling around. Result!
And then we reach the ‘but’…
The music, der, cuts out the moment you leave a page. You can restart it when you get to the next page, but that’s really not ideal, plus you’ll be starting at the very beginning, which isn’t a very good place to start again, and again, and again, whatever warbling Julie Andrews says.
Now, if anyone knows how this could be setup to play – or pause – site-wide and stay there site-wide regardless of navigation, or of any plug-in with this one’s simplicity & elegance that could, I’d love to hear about it.
Meantime, like I say, love it! Clean, simple, elegant.
It does what it promises very well. I have replaced the controls images with custom ones. Is it possible to get a code snippet to be able to choose between different “play” images?
Ridiculously simple. Works well. I customised the play/pause images to fit the design of my website. It plays audio. Job done. Please keep supporting it, it’s great!
The play button of this plug-in is pasted on the top page.
It is better not to take up extra space with compacts.
It’s been working fine so far. If it’s greedy, I think it would be even better if there were variations in icon design.
It’s a cute plugin. It’s been around a long time, nice to see the developer sticking with it.
I installed it years ago in a draft web site I still am working on.
I want a music file to play when someone loads the home page. Therefore, the autoplay option to play an audio/mp3 file as soon as the page loads is great.
However, it never stops playing. I have the player in the sidebar so the visitor can see it to shut it off if they want. However, there is no way to tell the little player to ONLY PLAY ONCE. That’s all I need it for. When the visitor arrives at the web site.
Unfortunately, is plays the music on every single page load.
I would kindly suggest that you add a default feature to limit plays to once, on the first page load, regardless of how many different pages are loaded.
Thanks for thinking about it.
| WordPress | 5.0+ requiredTested up to 6.9.4 |
| PHP | false+ required |
wp_safe_remote_get function instead of wp_remote_get to get the file headers.Plugin data sourced from WordPress.org. Analysis and metrics by PluginSift.