Sound Formats

To further enhance the browsing experience, sound can be added to stimulate the audio senses of a person. This way, the viewer will receive the full range of the multimedia treatment.

There are five very important items that needs to be addressed before any sound should be added.

  1. Sound from a web page can only be heard if the computer system viewing the page is equipped with a sound card.
  2. You must decide which sound format to use.
  3. You must also take into consideratio the amount of time it will take for the sound clip to download.
  4. Please make sure the sound clip is appropriate for the page. For example, a global corporation will not have a sound clip of the latest song on their introduction page.
  5. Sound clips can be programmed to play automatically or user invoked. Please keep this in mind when embedding sound files.
There are a couple different sound file formats that can be placed within a web page, .wave, .au, .aiff, and .midi. Wave, Au, Aiff are sound recordings. Basically, you can take a sound editting program, record a saying or song and place it on the page. These formats tend to be quite large even for a small recording. So please keep in mind the download time when embedding these sound formats.

MIDI, and How It Works

The other format, MIDI, which stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface is not a sound recording file. Rather, it is a type of text file which instructs the browser to to play a certain key or musical note. MIDI is very popular with electronic musicians because it allows them to compose music no one person can perform alone.

There are two ways to create MIDI's. One is to create it using squencer software. The other is to record the MIDI with a musical instrument that supports the export of MIDI.

How Do You Embed Sound Using HTML

Sound can be simply added by typing in the following line:

<A HREF="yourSoundFile.wav">The Name of Your Sound File</a>

The following line of code will embed the sound into the body and automatically play the sound when the page loads:

<embed src="sound.mid" autostart="true" Hidden="true" loop="true">

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