Embedding Sound in a Webpage

Embedding Sound
in a Webpage

What file formats can I include in my pages? Netscape's <EMBED> tag plays audio files in WAV, AIFF, AU, and MIDI formats. However, the most popular formats are MIDI and WAV.

MIDI (.mid) format gives you high quality digital sound.
WAV (.wav) format provides a smaller file size, but the sound quality is not as good as MIDI.
AU (.au) format gives sound quality that is poor, but the file is quite small; used for recording short speeches.
AIFF (.aiff) was developed by Apple for music and high quality sound.

Good sources of MIDI files include the Harmony Central list, the Wav and Midi Sound Sources list, and The MIDI Farm. Good sources for WAVs include Natalie's Wav Page and Margie's List of Classic Songs. Another way to find a song is to use Google and insert the name of the song in "quotation marks" followed by the word wav.

Once you have located the file you wish to use on your page, download the file to your floppy A. Be sure to put it in the folder where all of your images and the master page are located. If the file is too large for your floppy A, either eliminate some materials from the disk or select another song. Perhaps changing from the MIDI format to the WAV format will save some space on the disk.

Here is how to use an <EMBED> tag. From inside Netscape Composer, place the cursor on the spot where you wish the sound control (console) to be displayed, usually at or near the bottom of the page. Click on "Insert" and "HTML Tag". Type these commands exactly as written, including the symbols and spaces:
<EMBED SRC=yourfile.wav AUTOSTART=true WIDTH=144 HEIGHT=60 LOOP=1> (Of course, the only change you will make is to actually insert the name of your song file in place of the words "yourfile.wav".)

Thanks to Misty for the Osborne Brothers' Rocky Top song!

Explanations of the command codes:

AUTOSTART=true means automatically play sound when document is loaded. This way, the sound will play as a background sound. (You can also set the value to "false" which would mean that the sound would play only when the "play" button was clicked.)
LOOP=n This tells browser how many times to play sound. n could be an integer, "true", or "false". Setting LOOP=true means the browser will continue playing your sound until the stop button on the console is clicked.
WIDTH and HEIGHT This is how the sound control (console) will be displayed. Setting them as the given numbers, browsers will display a full console. Setting the width=0 and height=2, the console will not displayed by the browser. Other values that are too small will cause the browser to display an incomplete image. (You might also hide it by placing HIDDEN=true like this: <EMBED SRC=yourfile.wav AUTOSTART=true HIDDEN=true LOOP=1>)

Revised April 23, 2002, by Dr. Bruce Lewis for use in EDU 506.