Hey, I'm wondering if you'd be able to give me some advice. On my theme, the newer audio posts just show up as default mp3 modules, without all the css that would normally apply to an audio post. Tumblr seems to have changed its coding for new audio posts, and I'm not exactly sure how to get my old theme to apply to new posts. The old posts were classified as 'audio posts' in the code, but the new code seems to have removed that, so it only has the audio controls, not the player code.
Hey, sorry for the long delay in answering, I haven't been keeping close tabs on it. But if you still need a hand here (or for anyone else who's also wondering about this!) here's a run-through of what's up here.
The TL;DR: is summarised a bit obliquely in Tumblr's custom theme documentation (which I'm surprised they even update still, there's a lot that goes unmentioned here that you can really only find by pulling down a complete theme from the Tumblr theme selections and inspecting the code, I've found):
Basically, pretty much any new audio post is going to be NPF-style, so any styles that use any of the Audio-post specific functionality will not be used. Instead, as you can see below, Tumblr renders NPF posts as a text post (note the <article class="post text" in the markup below).
What you can also see here is that NPF audio posts can contain multiple audio players, and will have them laid out with the following structure:
<figure class="tmblr-full">
<audio controls="controls">
<source src="AUDIO_URL_HERE" type="media/type">
</audio>
</figure>
The styling of these audio players is pretty much exclusively done by your browser, and is pretty variable between browsers, but always fairly simple and bare-bones. Tumblr itself has very little control over them, even.
The only real way to "style" these things is to effectively hide them completely with something like display: none; in CSS, and then use JavaScript to control them with some additional buttons or something that you embed around them. Because you don't have a lot of granular control of the audio players or even have much indication of where they'll be embedded with how NPF works currently, I'm pretty sure you'll essentially have to cobble together some JS to detect these elements and fill in some more traditional HTML buttons and whatnot around them, and rig them up to events that control the actual (hidden) audio element.
I'm somewhat hopeful that eventually @staff will update their custom theme framework to properly work with NPF posts, because the only proper solution in my mind is that the old {block:Audio} and other posts type placeholders are "brought back" in some form or another to allow us to define what, exactly an NPF post "block" should look like for each of the NPF content types.
Till then, any possible solution will have to be hacky as all heck, I'm afraid.