Audio play button greyed out for Insert From URL

Hi @peong,

Upon checking the link that you’ve shared on your website, the reason that the audio play button doesn’t seem to work is because the link that you’ve added to your audio is from Google Drive and it can’t be accessed on the WordPress website. It shows a 403 forbidden error when I check your website using Brower Developer Tools under the Network tab.
See image: https://prnt.sc/d2vOTdwS_Sqs.

My advice is to try to upload the MP3 file to your WordPress media library and use that link from your media library instead of a Google Drive link.

Let me know how it goes.

Thanks

All the audio files’ URLs are returning 403: Forbidden.

So the real problem here is that the URLs of the audio files themselves are broken, that’s why the players are greyed out.

It seems Google has changed something at their end, and those Google Drive URLs aren’t working any longer.

So this has nothing to do with WordPress or the fact that you’re using external URLs. Just that the URLs are broken.

Below are two other users with broken URLs (images in those cases) from Google Drive:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/custom-html-widget-stopped-working-no-image-served/

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/google-drive-embedded-images-not-displaying-on-website/

FYI: Here’s a trouble ticket reported on Google’s own issue tracker about this 403: Forbidden problem for Google Drive links:

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/319531488

… with many people experiencing the same issue, some of whom aren’t even using WordPress at all.

Note that embedding Google Drive files using the iframe code provided by Google still works. It’s the undocumented direct linking hack you’re using — that has no official support — that’s what’s broken.

As Jerry mentioned above, the best solution is to upload the files to your own website. Alternatively, you could upload the files to a dedicated music-sharing site (eg SoundCloud, Spotify, etc) and use their player (instead of WordPress’ audio block/player).

Good luck!