The simple and basic way to put music on a web site is to simply put the
following into the HTML code of your web site:
<EMBED SRC="your_sound_file" HIDDEN=true AUTOSTART=true>
<NOEMBED><BGSOUND SRC="your_sound_file"></NOEMBED>
Where your_sound_file is the name of your WAV, MP3, or MIDI file.
The first line, the one that begins with EMBED, is the one that will be read
by most web browsers. So in most cases, your visitors' web browser will see
the EMBED line, react to it, and then ignore the NOEMBED line.
A few web browsers (very few now) do not support the EMBED command, which
is why the second line is added. The second line, beginning with NOEMBED,
is an optional extra that will kick in if the web site is read by a browser
that does not support the EMBED feature.
That means that even if you drop the second line out and only include the
first line, the music will still work for about 95% of your visitors.
Before you do this however, it's probably a good idea to change the bit-rate
of the mp3 file. Mp3 is a file format that lets you choose your own balance
between sound quality and file size. The smaller you want to make your sound
file, the lower you have to put the sound quality.
When you purchase an mp3 file from us, you get it in a bit-rate of 192 kbps
(kilo-bytes per second) bit-rate. This represents perfect CD-quality audio,
but the file is pretty big. And because the file is big, there is a lot of
data that has to be transferred over the internet before your web site visitors
will start to hear the music. And when the music starts to play, it may break
up, stutter, and start-stop, simply because there is such a large amount of
data that has to keep transferring from your web site to your visitor's computer,
and when the data isn't flowing fast enough the sound will break up.
So -- before you put the music on your web site, it's a good idea to lower
this bit-rate to something like 32 kbps or maybe 56 kbps. That will drastically
reduce the size of the file, but it will also lower the sound quality. At
56 kbps the sound quality will be similar to the previews on our web site
(we use 56 kbps mp3-encoding for all our previews), and at 32 kbps sound quality
will be lower, but still pretty acceptable.
We can help you with changing the bit-rate of the sound files for you. We
have advanced tools that allows us to do this fast -- it literally only takes
us a minute to change the bit-rate of multiple sound files, and we are happy
to do this for our customers, free of charge. Just place your order as normal,
and then ask us to change the bit-rate to whatever you want (32 kbps is usually
okay for web site use).
Should you wish to play around with the sound files yourself and change the
bit-rate of your mp3 files, you need a sound editing tool, such as the free
Audacity or
similar.
