Best Audacity export settings for short audio previews on a website?

This is a template for a web page with an audio file.

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title>Web page tab text goes here</title>
</head>
<body>
    <br />
    <br />
    <video controls style="width: 400px; height: 500px; background-color: black;" poster="bc000.png" preload="metadata">
        <source src="bc000.mp3" type="audio/mpeg" />
        <track default src="bc000.vtt" kind="captions" srclang="en" label="English">
        <ul>
            <li>
                <a href="bc000.mp3">Listen to episode 000 </a>
            </li>
        </ul>
    </video>
    <br />
    <br />
    <ul>
        <li>
            <a href="#bcTranscript">Transcript</a>
        </li>
    </ul>
    <br />
    Text of web page goes here.
    <br />
    <br />
    <iframe id="bcTranscript" src="bc000.vtt" frameborder="1" style="border: 1px solid white; width: 800px; height: 400px;" height="400" width="800" name="bcTranscript" scrolling="auto" title="Transcript"></iframe>
    <br />
    <br />
</body>
</html>

The <video></video> element and the tags between them make up the audio player with controls the user can click on to start and stop playback of the media.

I highly recommend providing a transcript which will play along with the audio in the control. You can use the OpenVINO Whisper AI to generate the transcript inside Audacity. When it is done, it will create a series of labels in a Label track of the Audacity project. The main advantage is that you can listen along to the audio in Audacity, and correct the text in the labels (with the hidden timestamps embedded) all in one place instead of switching between an audio player and a text editor.

Once the text in the labels is correct, extract the labels to a .VTT file. The <video> element of the web page can use the text and timestamps in the VTT file to synchronize the text with the audio as it is playing in the browser program.

The <iframe> element at the bottom of the web page will allow people to read the transcript and search for text to locate a particular section of the audio.

Mix and render the audio tracts of the Audacity project to an exported .MP3 file that the <video> control can play. Create a .PNG file as cover art for the <video> control as a background for the transcript to display over. It is easier to organize things if you give these three files the same filename with their different extensions.

I would also recommend that you use a meta tag editor to add the cover art to the MP3 file as well as title, track, and copyright information.

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