Lorian Network | Building | Multimedia | Sound
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Introdution to
sound 		Adding sound can make your web page come alive. Unfortunately, it can also make your web page very obnoxious if you are not careful.
Embedded Sounds You should have heard a sound, windchimes, when you opened this page, if your computer audio system and browser are set up properly.

The reason the sound played when you opened the page is because a sound file is "embedded" into the page with an HTML statment. You can also "embed" a sound and show a control on the page to play it as shown on the right.		 Windchimes
Types of Sound Files. There are many different formats of digitized sound and many different file types available. Some of the most common are shown to the right.

Browsers have the ability to play some sounds without the use of a plug-in or an external program, usually .wav, .au and .aif files.		 Digitized Sound types
  • .wav (windows audio)
  • .aif (audio interchange format)
  • .mp3 (mpeg II layer 3 sound)
  • .au (unix audio)
Other Sound types
  • .mid (midi)
Sound Files Rather than embedding a sound into your page, you can provide an external link to the sound file. What happen when you click on the link depends on the browser settings. The sound might be played, might call up an exteral player program to play it, or it might just download it to the disk drive. Play Windchimes
MP3 music files MP3 music files have become extremely popular because they produce "near CD" quality sound, but in a much smaller file than the digital track on a CD. However, they are still large files, usually two to five megabytes in size. We have embedded a link to an MP3 file handled by the Quicktime plug-in to the right.
MIDI music files MIDI files are not digitized sound files at all. Think of them as "sheet music" for computers. The computer playing a MIDI file must synthesize the music using it's sound system. The MIDI file will sound a little different from computer to computer based on it's capability to synthesize the music.
Real Media Streaming Audio Probably the most well known and common audio format on the web is from Real Media Networks, who helped pioneer audio on the internet. Look for Real Audio demo coming soon.
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