WaveformPlayer is in WordPress core

On 19 August 2026, WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou” shipped with a brand-new Playlist block — and the waveform your listeners see inside it is ours.

We’re enormously proud of this one. WaveformPlayer started as a small, zero-dependency script for getting a good-looking audio player onto a page without dragging a framework along behind it. It now ships inside the most widely used CMS on the web. No plugin, no CDN link, nothing to enqueue: on any site running 7.1, the player is already there the moment a Playlist block hits the page.

Bring multiple audio tracks together in one playlist, with an optional waveform that gives listeners a visual sense of each track as it plays.

— The WordPress 7.1 release post

Thank you, Ben

None of this would have happened without Ben Dwyer (scruffian), who proposed the visualization, built it, and carried it through review and into core back in March. Getting a third-party library into WordPress core is not a small thing to take on, and he did it with a lot of care. Thank you.

What you get in the block

A Visualization style dropdown in the block sidebar, offering the same six waveform styles documented here — bars, mirror, line, blocks, dots and seekbar — plus the option to show each track’s artwork inside the play button.

It's the player, not the Playlist extension

Core bundles @arraypress/waveform-player. The Playlist block is WordPress’s own block — it just uses the player to draw each track’s waveform. If you want to build playlists in your own HTML, that’s @arraypress/waveform-playlist, a separate extension.

Using the player outside the block

Core’s copy is scoped to the Playlist block. To put a player anywhere else in a theme or plugin — a shortcode, a template, your own block — enqueue it yourself, as described in Frameworks & Platforms → WordPress.

That copy is yours to version. Core pins its own (7.1 shipped with 1.26.0) and tracks WordPress’s release cycle, not ours.