How to Work With Audio in Substack

Podcast episodes, audio embeds and voiceovers

Karen Cherry
5 min readApr 19, 2024
Image: Wayhomestudio on Freepik.com

Let’s talk about using audio in Substack.

Why use audio? Perhaps you want to share a song with your subscribers, or the call of a rare bird you heard. Or perhaps an audio version of each post is a special benefit you reserve for paying subscribers.

Some writers use audio in an ad-hoc way in their Substack publications, by sharing audio content occasionally in their posts. Others add audio or voiceovers to every post. Still others create a whole podcast, which is like a TV series with multiple episodes, but with no images, only sounds.

There are four ways to use audio in Substack:

  1. create a special audio post, which Substack calls a podcast episode;
  2. embed a link to audio hosted on an external service like Spotify into an ordinary post;
  3. add Substack-hosted audio to an ordinary post;
  4. add a voiceover to a post.

When audio is ‘hosted’, it means the digital file which contains the ‘sounds’ is saved in a certain location. An audio file hosted by Substack is saved and ‘lives’ within computers controlled by Substack (‘Substack servers’). An externally-hosted file is one that is hosted outside of Substack, on another…

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Karen Cherry

Substack writer. Secret tree hugger. Aussie business owner with >$19K revenue on Substack. Refusing to dumb it down.