Publishing songs to Mastodon

This is a quick guide for musicians who want to publish their songs on Mastodon. Mastodon supports uploading media, and music files will be embedded so that followers can listen to it from their timeline. But there's a small trick that greatly improves the experience: adding covert art!

You can the lame MP3 encoder to convert WAV files to MP3 and add a cover image. All you need to do is:

lame --ti cover.jpg song.wav song.mp3

Now when you attach the song.mp3 file to a Mastodon post the embedded player will show the cover image, and it will also have a nice background color based on the cover art:

Edit: turns out you can now do this from the UI! Just upload an MP3 and then click the edit button. You'll be able to choose an image file to use as the cover. So cool!