Adding Sounds

A further feature of HTML is the ability to apply sounds or music to your pages. I'll try and guide you through the steps to get it up and running. Please read the entire page especially if you experience problems with your Midi File not starting up automatically when you visit your page.

The most often used sound file type is a MIDI sequence sound. The computer you are viewing the page on must be able to support this feature i.e. have a MIDI player installed (along with a sound card and speakers obviously!) or it will ignore the background sounds. MIDI files are sound files that aren't of the quality of WAV, however they require much less disk space and are much quicker to download. To play a MIDI file, you need a sound card, speakers, and a MIDI player. MIDI players come with Windows 95. Often your favorite songs will not sound so good in MIDI format.

The music you should be able to hear playing in the background to this page is a MIDI file and is purely a set of commands which operate a sound synthesiser built into most modern sound cards. Midis are distinctly different from a WAV files which are real sounds recorded digitally.

The best way (in my opinion) to hear a midi file played is through a WAVE Table Sound Card. A WAVE Table card is one that stores ACTUAL sound samples on the card itself. In other words, the sound of a piano is stored on the card so when a MIDI file tells it to play a piano, you hear a PIANO and not the sound of a "synthesized" piano. It stores the actual sounds of a LOT of different instruments and there is the capability of adding more memory to MOST cards to allow you to load even MORE samples.

Getting a Midi file to play in the background is simply a matter of putting a couple of lines in your HTML code. Both Microsoft Explorer 3.0 and Netscape 3.0 browsers now support the same command to get a Midi to play. So if you want to set up your page so that people using either of those browsers can hear a Midi, you can use the following command ...

Breaking the above line down, this is what each command does ...

• Src="name.mid" --- Defines the Midi file that you want to play.
• Width=144 Height=56 --- Defines the viewable size for the Midi Player.
• Autostart=TRUE --- This tells the Midi to automatically start playing once it is loaded. If this is not here (or is FALSE), then the listener has to click on the play button to hear the Midi.
• Loop=5 --- This causes the Midi file to replay (loop) 5 times if the listener stays on the page long enough to hear it that many times. This can be changed to whatever you want or completely removed so the Midi only plays one time and the listener must click the play button to hear it again. To have the Midi Loop FOREVER, enter Loop=true.

Just put the above line in your HTML code wherever you want the Midi Player to show up.

Change the name of the Midi file ("name.mid" in the above example) to the name of YOUR Midi File remembering to leave the double quotes around the filename. Ensure the Midi file is in the same directory as the HTML file, and that is all there is to it.

One word of warning though, it appears that Netscape may have a bug in it that will not allow a Midi to LOOP if you set the WIDTH and HEIGHT to 0 (nought) or 1, no matter what number you enter for the loop counter. In fact, it won't allow it to loop until they are set to at least 2. Explorer does not seem to have a problem with the 0's.

Go to WAV files

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