Soundcheck

$115

Soundcheck - Featured Image

Soundcheck is a one-of-a-kind audio theme for WordPress perfect for bands, artists, musicians, or the like. Built with the latest web technologies, Soundcheck features a custom MP3 audio player allowing your visitors to browse, select, play and skip through tracks right on your website. Also included, is Gig/Events functionality, 4 custom widgets, 4 custom page templates, and a variety of other specific Theme Options.

Custom Audio Player

 

soundcheck-audio-player-widgetNeed to let your site be heard? Soundcheck comes with a custom audio player with playlist functionality and display options. Adding audio is easy:

  • Select the Audio post format.
  • Upload the audio (.mp3) you would like to be included in the player.
  • And that’s it!

Soundcheck automatically pulls the .mp3 audio files from the gallery and inserts an audio player at the top of the post, playlist and all! Nice!

There are a few other methods of displaying audio with Soundcheck. After creating an audio post, you will have the ability to place any number of audio players into any one of Soundcheck’s 7 widgetized areas. On top of that, the option to display all your audio posts (albums) on one page automatically can be done with the custom Discography page template. Beasty!

Change Track, Album, and Artist Names

You can choose to change the track, album, and artist name for each audio file uploaded to the post. To do this, you can go to the post, click on the “Add Media” icon (next to Upload/Insert audio above the post editor), and choose the audio file you wish to edit. From there you can update the following:

  • Track: Update the Title option of the audio track.
  • Artist: Update the Caption option of the audio track. By default, the Post author’s name is used.
  • Album: Updated the Description option of the audio track. By default, the Post Title is used.
NOTE: The Audio post format requires .mp3 type files to play. In order to upload .mp3 files, you must have the space upgrade.

Gigs / Events Functionality

Soundcheck - Events Widget

Soundcheck includes some basic gigs/events management. This is a great way to let your visitors know where you will be playing. Using native WordPress functionality, setting up an events page can be done with a few easy steps.

  1. Create a new post, Schedule the event, and place it in an Events category.
  2. Create a new page and set it to use the “Events” page template.
  3. Set the Events category via the Theme Options

Now that this is done, visitors can view your Events page and see all scheduled/upcoming events. As a bonus, Soundcheck comes with a custom Events widget to place in your sidebars! Hot dog!

Widgets

Soundcheck includes four custom widgets to compliment various features of the theme.

  • Audio Player – Display and playback any audio post with this custom audio player widget, complete with controls, playlist, and display options.
  • Events – Display upcoming gigs/events.
  • Featured Category – Feature a category of posts. Includes variety of display options.
  • Featured Post – Feature an individual post. Includes a variety of display options.

Page Templates

To offer some advanced functionality and layout options, Soundcheck comes with four specially designed page templates.

  • Blog – Display all posts in a blog format with the option to pick a specific category via the Theme Options.
  • Discography – Show all audio posts (albums) on one page with this page template. All posts are displayed via a custom audio player with controls, playlist, and display options.
  • Events – Display all scheduled/upcoming events from a specific category.
  • Full Width – Show your content full width, without any sidebars.

Post Formats

Post formats are at the heart of Soundcheck, which includes audio, image, gallery, and video post format options. By setting a post format, Soundcheck will do something slightly different with the post to accommodate for the media type set.

For example, by setting the Audio post format on a post, Soundcheck will automatically grab any .mp3 files from the gallery and display them in a custom audio player.

Theme Options

In addition to the various supported Post Formats, there are a refined set of options available throughout Soundcheck’s Theme Options page, including:

Logo Options

  • Image Logo Upload
  • Enable site tagline

General Options

  • Blog Category Select
  • Events Category Select
  • Featured Sidebar – Home Column 1
  • Featured Sidebar – Primary

Hero Slider Options

  • Hero Category Select
  • Randomize Slides?
  • Slide Animation
    • Slide
    • Fade
  • Slider Speed
  • Slider Timeout
  • Carousel Category Select
  • Thumbnail Count
  • Page Display (enable carousel on a variety of different page types)

Audio Player Options

  • Single Pages – Display Playlist
  • Single Pages – Autoplay Audio?
  • Discography Template – Display Content
  • Discography Template – Display Playlist Button

Social Media Options

  • RSS
  • FeedBurner
  • Amazon
  • Bandcamp
  • Facebook
  • Flickr
  • iTunes
  • Last.fm
  • MySpace
  • Soundcloud
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube
Quick Specs (all measurements in pixels):

  1. Full width content is 910.
  2. Content with one sidebar is 670 and sidebar is 200.
  3. Content with two sidebar is 430 and each sidebar is 200.
  4. Hero slider images 1600x440 max.
  5. Audio Player artwork 220x220 max.

Still have questions? Get premium theme support in the forums!

How to setup the Hero Slides area?

Max Image Width: 1600x440 pixels

The Hero Slides area is the large image carousel above the primary navigation at the top of each page. At it's most basic level, here is how to create a "Slide", as done in the theme demo:

  1. Create/Edit a Post and give it a title.
  2. Set a Featured Image. This image will be used as the large, full width image as seen in the demo.
  3. Add the slide to a special slides category (e.g. "Hero Slides").
  4. Publish/Update the post.

Setting the Hero Slide Category

Now that you have at least one slide created, we can set Hero Slide category via the Appearance > Theme Options > Hero Slides. Here, we will want to set the "Category" option to use the "Hero Slides" category from the dropdown list. By doing this, we are telling the theme to use the posts in the "Hero Slides" category as the themes "Slides".

Slide Content

The theme demo show a variety of slides, some with text, an image, a gallery, a video, or just plain. Any content you add to the slides content area will be displayed over the background image (Featured Image). Additionally, you can set a Format for the slide. For example, if you add a video to the content area, you can assign it to be a "Video" format. This will treat the slide a bit differently in terms of styling. If you just want text, simply enter text in the slide and set the format to "Standard".

How to create an Album?

Soundcheck comes with a custom audio player with playlist functionality built in. Adding audio is easy:

  1. Create/Edit a post and give it a title.
  2. Select the Audio post format.
  3. Upload one or more MP3 audio files to the Posts gallery (NOT via the Media menu).
  4. Set a featured image to be used for the Album artwork.

It's important to note, when adding audio, you need to add/upload the audio to the Post itself, NOT via the Media menu. You should see all your audio files in the "Gallery" tab of the Media lightbox for a post.

When viewing the post, you will see a fully functional audio player. There are a few display and control options available for the audio player in Appearance > Theme Options > Audio Player (section).

NOTE: The Audio post format requires .mp3 type files to play. In order to upload .mp3 files, you must have the space upgrade.

Update Album & Track Info

By default, the theme uses pieces of the post content as the albums info. For example, the Album Title uses the Posts title and the Artist is set to use the Posts Author name. Below are ways to adjust these more to your liking.

After successfully uploading audio to a post:

  1. Open the media manager by clicking on the "Add Media" button.
  2. Choose the "Insert Media" option on the left side of the Media popup window.
  3. Choose the "Media Library" option in the main column.
  4. In the dropdown just below, choose "Uploaded to this post"

You should now see all your audio uploaded to that post. You can drag and drop the audio in order. You can also select an audio file and update it's info (right side).

  • Title: Track Title
  • Caption: Artist Name
  • Description: Album Name

How to add an Event?

Events are setup using the WordPress scheduling feature. Here are the steps to create an events page.

  • Create/Edit a post, give it a title, and fill in the content area with the event details.
  • Add the event to a special Events category (e.g. "Events")
  • Schedule the Event.
  • In Appearance > Theme Options > General (section), set the Events Category option.
  • Lastly, create/edit a page and set it to use the "Events" page template.

    • When viewing the Events Page, you will see all the Scheduled Posts placed in the "Events" category.

    City and State / Post Excerpt

    Optionally, you can add information to the post's excerpt. If this is done, the information will be included with the Post's Title. An example of this can be seen in the theme demo, where we have supplied a City and State (e.g. Bozeman, MT).

    The social media icons, Twitter and Facebook, seen the the theme demo, are done via WordPress Custom Menus and CSS class names.

    • Go to Appearance > Menus and setup your setup/edit your custom menus.
    • On the menus page, click on "Screen Options" and make sure the "CSS Classes" checkbox is checked.
    • Now, add a custom link and give it a URL of "#" and a Label of "Twitter".
    • Click "Add to menu"
    • That link should be on the Right side in your menu. Toggle down the options by clicking on the arrow to the right of the name (Twitter)
    • In the "CSS Classes (optional)" option, give it a class name of "twitter".

    This same process will go for all of the available social media icons by changing "Twitter" to the name of the desired social media network.