Omny Studio to announce audio on Facebook via conversion to video player

Australia-based Omny Studio will announce a new tool which easily converts audio to a video player for posting on Facebook. This clever automated workaround solves one of the most vexing problems in social audio — Facebook’s inexplicable lack of native audio.

“As any audio content maker will tell you, the social sharing aspect of audio is just hard,” Omny says in a blog announcement that will be posted tomorrow. It’s especially hard on Facebook, which coincidentally is the social platform with the biggest reach in the English-speaking world.

Omny Studio is a radio production platform which automatically and customizably captures audio, edits it into snackable clips, and posts it to social media. (Analytics and monetization features are part of the suite.) As podcasting and on-demand spoken-word audio of all sorts become more popular, consumer interest provides a natural on-ramp for radio to get involved in online audio. Omny provides software tools that can clip broadcast audio as it happens, get it online fast, build listener engagement in the moment, and build an archive of spoken-word content that time-shifts real-time broadcasting to on-demand audio.

All well and good. But Facebook puts a boulder in that stream by refusing to build a native audio player, as it has with video. Nobody — neither a radio station nor an individual user with a 10-second clip spoken into a phone — can put a sound directly onto Facebook. The problem got worse several months ago when SoundCloud removed its capability to play within Facebook.

To its (belated) credit, Facebook is inching (with maddening hesitancy) into audio with experimental partnerships with NPR and Deezer. But until Facebook makes audio a natural part of its platform for all users, using its video player for audio is a solution. (YouTube is frequently used this way, when users upload music tracks and albums.)

Omny Studio grabbed the video workaround by the horns with its new feature, and has targeted it strongly to podcasters, in addition to radio broadcasters. That makes sense — Facebook is a natural promotion platform for podcasting … or would be if Facebook, you know, did audio. Omny appears to be taking the hassle out of converting audio to a video player.