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Questions about the pronunciation of a word as heard are probably common for a site for people learning a language. I can imagine questions similar to the following ones:

  • I listened to this [link to an audio file, or a video] but I don't understand what word is being said at the beginning, and at the end. It sounds like [word the OP is guessing], but the pronunciation is quite strange, and not what I think is the correct one. What are those words? Why does the pronunciation sound strange, to me?
  • I am listening to this audio file [link to the audio file] used for exercises on pronunciation, but I don't understand the difference between the pronunciation of the third, and the fifth word. Can anybody tell me the difference?

In those questions, the audio/video file are necessary to answer the question. Asking those users not to link the file would not make any sense, since the question is about pronunciation, and asking the users to describe with their words the pronunciation is unpractical.

On another site, it was requested to add an embedded audio player and it was added. Probably the same/similar feature would be helpful on ELL.

Since now the site is not in beta phase anymore, maybe this request could be implemented.

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    Sounds like a good idea to me. Presumably the main thrust of this is that since SO itself would store the audio files, there wouldn't be any problem with "link rot".
    – FumbleFingers
    Feb 15, 2013 at 18:35
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    The files would still be hosted on third-party server, in the same way the images are not hosted on Stack Exchange servers. In the case of audio/video files, Stack Exchange doesn't have a custom account used to store the audio/video files, which is what happens with the images.
    – apaderno
    Feb 15, 2013 at 18:52
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    On AVP, however, users are mostly posting files they themselves have produced. Users here mostly post files they have found on the internet, often video files; how many of them will know how to download, to extract audio, to transcode to a standard format?
    – StoneyB on hiatus
    Feb 15, 2013 at 19:04
  • @snailplane Audio files could be used in answers too. It is probable the feature is implemented for answers and questions, or at least I hope so. :) If then the feature will be used just on questions, that doesn't mean it should be enabled only on questions (if that is even possible).
    – apaderno
    Feb 16, 2013 at 13:35
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    @snailplane In some cases it would be necessary to provide audio in the answers to properly answer the questions. For example, if a question provides two incorrect pronunciations and asks which one is correct, answers would need to provide the correct pronunciation(s).
    – ctype.h
    Feb 16, 2013 at 23:17
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    Related request on Japanese.SE: meta.japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/1513/…
    – user230
    Apr 30, 2016 at 17:35
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    There's a question from three years ago on meta asking for this functionality for language sites: meta.stackexchange.com/q/152282/273494 with only 50 views.
    – ColleenV
    Oct 9, 2016 at 10:50

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