Sounding is out.

It is the third Aftertype theme, and it is for the kind of site neither Northline nor Azimuth is built for: a show. Northline is for magazines, Azimuth is for newsletters. Sounding is for podcasts where the episode is the main thing on the page and everything else follows it.

The first thing you see on an episode is the player. The audio card at the top of a post moves into a band of your show's colour, with the episode number, the title, the duration and the hosts. Press play without scrolling, on a phone too. If an episode starts with a YouTube or Vimeo embed or a video card instead, that takes the player's place. No separate video player, no extra setup.

Episodes are numbered, counted per show, in the band and in every list. Tag an episode #bonus and it stays out of the count. The archive is a single page with every episode on it, and it reads well without an image per episode, because most shows do not have one.

Listen links come from Ghost's own secondary navigation. Add Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Pocket Casts or your RSS feed there and Sounding recognizes the service and shows it under the player and in the footer. Tag a few episodes #start-here and new listeners get them on the homepage, oldest first.

A browser stops audio when you open another page. Keeping it playing means taking over Ghost's navigation, and that tends to break signup forms, comments and search. So Sounding does the smaller thing: it remembers where each listener stopped and offers to resume, and the lockscreen and media keys show the episode, the show and the artwork while the page is open.

For paid members there is the private feed. Since March, Ghost has an official Transistor integration that gives every paid member a personal podcast feed. Sounding adds the button that gets them there, after every episode and on the About and Subscribe pages. It needs a Transistor plan with private podcasts of your own; without it, everything else works the same, and Sounding works with whichever host serves your feed.

Things I left out: a persistent player, for the reason above. A built-in podcast host, because Ghost and your host already do that. Custom page builders. Each one would make the theme bigger and the site slower.

The details that do not show in a screenshot: about 6 kB of JavaScript and no framework. Keyboard-operable player and navigation. axe-core reports no WCAG 2.1 A or AA violations on ten page types, in light and dark, for visitors, free and paid members. Your accent colour is measured in the browser and adjusted where text on the band would be too faint to read.

The launch price is US$109 until 4 November, then US$129, one-time, single site, with updates for as long as Sounding is maintained. The demo runs a small made-up show about buildings and the way they sound: sounding.aftertype.studio. The theme page is at aftertype.studio/themes/sounding.

If you run a podcast on Ghost and something in Sounding does not fit how you publish, tell me. That is how the next release gets decided.