Adding Audio/Video To Your Website

Adding Audio/Video To Your Website
Adding audio or video to your website is a definite plus
these days. Increasing your chances of extra revenue
generation. Streaming audio/video generally serves two
purposes. One being entertainment value, and the other,
more practical and useful in our case, is the generation of
income by using the technology to demonstrate and promote
your products.

Until fairly recently, professional website designers were
wary of adding multi-media streams to a website. But now
the spread of high speed broadband internet connections has
removed the barrier for the use of such additions. There is
still a lot to consider, so for the time being let us deal
with audio streams, and save the video for another article.

Audio files have differing formats, the most popular
currently being the MP3 and MIDI. What exactly is a MIDI
and an MP3, and what are the differences? I have described
a few sound file formats below, together with their various
attributes to help you decide which to use in your website.

MIDI is a music file type that utilises the built in
devices in your computer sound card, making the file size
pretty lightweight. However sound cards vary enormously, so
playing a MIDI file on two different computers with
different sound cards is likely to produce different
results. Another problem with MIDI files is that they can
sound rather like the ring tones of old cell phones. This
could give your website a distinctly amateurish feel. This
is to be avoided. You don't want to be labelled an amateur
when you are selling something. Of course the plus side is
that because of their small size, people on dial-up
connections will appreciate the load speed of your site.

MP3 is an audio file which is highly compressed, achieving
a smaller file size. People using DSL connections will
probably download a 5mb MP3 file in under a minute. Dial-up
connections will typically take 3 to 5 minutes to download
a single song of average playing time.

Because of its compressed nature, sounds from MP3 files are
not as good as from your CD player. Also you will need to
"loop" these files to get them to play continuously whilst,
for instance, people surf your site. Looping is not easy
with MP3's. A big drawback is that you require specific MP3
programs to play the files, and when someone enters a site
using these files your Real Player, or Windows Media
Player, might open automatically to play them, spoiling the
effect.

In terms of quality, the best sound file format is the WAV
file. Using this format will give you studio quality audio.
However the indisputable problem with these files is their
size. Even with fast broadband connection, a browser will
have a tough time loading a web page using WAV for its
audio stream.

When trying to incorporate audio streams into your website,
familiarity with flash files is an advantage. To make music
play continuously you will need to loop your file. WAV
files go through the looping process with no problems, but
MP3 and MIDI files will need to be associated with flash
files to achieve this.

All in all, you need to decide exactly what it is you wish
to achieve with your audio, and make your choice
accordingly. Don't be afraid to experiment to get the
result you are after. After all, as you can see, there are
several ways to add background sound to your web pages, and
you will undoubtedly be pleased that you did.

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Chris Haycock is an information publisher specialising in
helping people start their own home based business. You can
get an absolutely no cost two hour video on how to create
your own information products in one day, without writing a
single word, and start your own niche ebook business, by
going to:
http://www.easyebizz.com