Using Audio File Formats on Your Website

Adding music or video streams to your website is a definite plus for revenue generation. Audio-video streams serve two purposes. Primarily, audio and video streaming is used for entertainment. A more practical use of audio-video streaming is for revenue generation by using this technology to promote and demonstrate your products.

Normally, professional website designers are leery of adding multi-media streams to a website. However, the spread of high-speed internet connection throughout the world has finally removed the barrier for the use of multi-media streams. In this article, let us deal exclusively with audio streams. Audio files have different formats. The most popular among these audio formats are the MP3 and MIDI sound format. The question is, “what exactly is a MIDI and an MP3 and what are the differences?” Below is a collection of sound file formats together with their descriptions to help you decide which one to use in your website.

MIDI is a music file type that is considerably lightweight when it comes to the size of the file. The reason for this is that MIDI utilizes the built-in devices in the sound card of your computer. Of course, sound cards don’t sound the same so playing one MIDI file on two computers simultaneously may produce slightly different results. Another problem of MIDI files is that they sound mostly like ring tones of older model cellular phones. Having this installed in your website may give it an amateurish feel. You definitely don’t want to be labeled as an amateur especially when you’re selling something. On the plus side, because of their small size in terms of kilobytes, people who use 56kbps modems to connect to the internet will be able to appreciate the speed at which your website loads into their browsers.

MP3 is an audio file that is highly compressed to achieve a smaller file size. For people using DSL internet connections, downloading a 5MB MP3 file will most probably take less than a minute. For the slower 56 kbps modems, it takes approximately 3 to 5 minutes to download a single song with average playing time. Because of its compressed nature, the sounds produced by MP3 files are not as good as those you hear from your CD. Furthermore, you will have to “loop” a music file if you want it to play continuously in the background while people surf your website. MP3 files are very difficult to loop. The biggest disadvantage of using MP3 files is that they require MP3 player programs. Once you enter a website with MP3 background music, your Windows Media player or Real Player might open automatically to play the file.

The best sound file format in terms of quality is the WAV file format. Using WAV format to record your audio will give you recording studio quality audio. The BIG PROBLEM of WAV is its file size. Even with a DSL or cable internet connection, your browser will have a hard time loading a web page using WAV for its audio stream.

Familiarity with flash files is an advantage when trying to incorporate audio streams into your website. To make the music play continuously, you will have to perform the process of looping. Flash files can be used with either MP3 or WAV but, only WAV files go through the looping process without any difficulty.

As you can see there are many different ways to add background music to your web pages and you don’t have to worry about slow loading pages if you choose the right file format.