Ways to Add Music to Your Web site

There are many different ways to add music to your web site. It largely depends on the type, size and quality of your music file.

Types of music files

1. MIDI files (Musical Instrument Digital Interface)

This is the easiest file to incorporate into your web site because of it’s small file size and loads quickly. The sound may not be of high quality compared to an mp3 file but for in most cases it will be sufficient.

One advantage of MIDI files is that most sound cards can play a MIDI file and a WAV file (see below) at the same time.

2. WAV files

WAV is a format for storing sound in files, which was developed jointly by Microsoft and IBM. WAV allows you to add professional recordings to your web site. A one minute WAV file can be as large as 1MB in size, while a 1 minute MIDI file can be less than 25K. Using software converters, it may be possible to resample WAV files to reduce their file size.

3. MP3 Files

MP3 files produce a high quality sound because they are highly compressed, don’t take long to load and have a small fie size. One problem with playing them is that you need to have an external player. If your visitor’s computer does not have a player he may have to download one from the Net. This means he will have to leave your web site. Many computer users are not proficient or afraid to download files (because of getting viruses) so they may decide to opt out and click elsewhere.

4) FLASH files

Flash files offer the most flexibility for adding sound to your web site because you can set the quality level. Flash file to be. Flash also allows you to loop short pieces of sound to create ‘continuous’ background music files that are small in size. Only imported WAV files can be looped in Flash, MP3 files will not loop cleanly. A couple of disadvantages for using flash files is that you need expensive software to create them and not all visitors have the flash player installed on their machines. To bypass this you can include the free flash player download within the code of your web site.

5) Pre-Made Flash Loops

These are files that are professionally recorded and can loop almost indefinitely. They are only about 20k in size so they load almost instantly and contain professional quality music. You can purchase packages of Flash Music Loops at http://www.flashmusictracks.com. They include all types of music ie classical, country, rock, jazz, hip hop, ambient, fusion, funk, ethnic. These pre-made flash loop files are also very small and will play immediately when a person visits your web site.

Conclusion

When deciding on the type of music for your web site, choose music that won’t offend anyone, loads quickly and won’t require an external player that needs to be downloaded.