Incorporating Audio Without the Playbar

I have a multitude of courses I'm trying to build that include very straightforward (and long) audio lectures. I want to incorporate these lectures without breaking them up into individual slides, and the native Captivate playbar does not work well for this. I previously posted about the possibility of having the audio scrubbing disconnected from a user's ability to jump around a course's slides, but I came to understand that was not possible. I thought I had found a workaround solution, but it was previously a bit wonky at best and is now not working at all.

Anyway, I'm wondering what possibilities might exist to play audio in a course without utilizing Captivate's native playbar. I'm assuming that I could probably use a widget-type player from an external source such as SoundCloud, but ideally I want to have the audio files packaged along with the courses instead of being pulled as an external link. I know that I could build the ability to play and pause audio into an object, but ideally I want to have a graphical player so that users can scrub through these lengthy lectures.

One possibility that I've been exploring is using HTML5's native '<audio>' tag. I've been able to use that to bring in a very simple graphical audio player, through an 'HTML5 Animation' or a 'Web' object, but I'm having trouble getting a file to play or doing any sort of customization to the look of the player. So, I've got several questions that I'm hoping a more experienced Captivator might be able to field:

• In using the '<audio>' tag-- or any HTML-- where should I have any referenced files located? For instance, I'm currently including the attribute ' source src="combined.mp3" ', but the player does not seem to be accessing that mp3 regardless of where I put it in my published course directories.

• Are there means available for me to change the look of the audio player? There are some attributes that can be used directly in the HTML, like for 'width', but changes I make to that attribute doesn't seem to have any effect on how the player is displayed in the course. Typically the HTML5 audio player would be styled via CSS-- is there a way to do that in Captivate?

• Alternately, please let me know if there are other ways to incorporate an audio player in Captivate without using the native playbar. I have considered that a Captivate widget may exist for this purpose, but I haven't been able to find any-- likely because of the playbar typically being used for that functionality, but also most sources for Captivate widgets seem to be dead.

Thanks in advance!