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Recorded voices, sound effects, and music are underused on the Web. Why? For one, people surf in groups environments. For two, sound cards and good speakers are not standard equipment. However, as bandwidth increases and compression and streaming techniques improve, sound will get much more popular very soon. We'll talk about ear-cons like we talk about icons. Check out the folks at Real Networks, the industry leader. A good beginner's guide might help you get started.
The standard sound file formats are .au, .wav. To get the controls below, in Front Page, use Insert | Advanced and choose Plug-In. Browse for your audio file.
If you're looking for music, the MIDI file format, .mid, is most common. The folks at Real are making enough industry alliances that their formats, .ram and .ra, will become much more common.
Background sounds on Web pages are either blessedly neglected or scandalously underused. Personally, I wouldn't do it without telling you first. Good sites to find free sound clips are the WAV search engine and MP3.com.
ThinkQuest's Soundry
This interactive educational web site covers the basic concepts of what sound is, the specifics of how humans perceive it, the physics of sound, and a lab where you experiment with sounds.
FindSounds.com is the leading web search engine for finding sound effects and sample sounds on the Web.
Sound Effects Library's Free Sounds
eStreamingMedia has interesting free reports. One I downloaded in August 2001 is no longer available on their site as of December 2001, so I put it on the Ricci Street server, where you can download it as a .pdf file: Streaming Media for Business Purposes.
When your browser requests a web page from a server, the .htm file and the image files are downloaded into a cache on your PC or laptop and displayed from there. Because .htm files are often smaller than image files, you sometimes see the page first and then the images slowly come in.
The larger the file, the longer it takes. Audio files, especially music files, are often larger than image files. Thus the background sound that some of you are putting on your webs takes a couple of seconds, or more, before it downloads and displays.
People print pages, bookmark pages, and save pages to their desktop. People do save content, so plan for whether, and how, people will save and use video content.
If the clips are something people may want to download and save, I'd go with Quicktime or Windows media. They are file types people are accustomed to manipulating (as opposed to Flash).
What if you want to put a very large file on your page? For example, a couple of minutes of postage-stamp size video can be a 5 MB .mpg file and take half an hour to download. How long will someone wait? How long do you wait? How much room is on the server?
The Web doesn't care how you perceive the file -- with your eyes or your ears. It's just one long bit stream. Which gets us to streaming audio and video. (Note that most information for video applies equally well to audio.)
Inserting A Macromedia Flash Movie Into Your Frontpage Web
Yes and no.
Yes, you can do it. But no, you can't do it without a plug-in, that is, a special piece of software that the user must have. Not only that, but the server must be set up to deliver the audio file in pieces rather than as one downloadable file. This is called streaming.
The other big difference is what happens to the information. Because a downloaded file is cached, it can play over and over from the cache without the slow download. It can play when you're offline. You can move it elsewhere on your hard dive.
That's not what happens with a streamed file. Rather than go into a cache on your hard drive (ROM) it goes into a buffer in your memory (RAM) and is released when the buffer fills. The only way to play it again is to stream it again while you're online.
Ricci Street's server is set up to stream Real files in .ra or .ram format. I chose Real because the players are very common and because the basic production software is free. Of course, Real would love to have you upgrade by purchasing their software. Before you do so, please note that Microsoft's new operating system, Windows ME, now available, has all this capability built-in.
Before you do anything, I would recommend highly that you look at Real's Primer on Streaming Media. On their home page at http://real.com, go to the box labeled RealNetworks.com on the middle right of the page. Click on the Three Basic Steps image next to the phrase "Interested in learning more about streaming media?"
The primer has five parts and you should play them all. If you don't already have the latest Real player on your PC or laptop, you will be prompted to download and install it first.
If you use a Logitech video cam (the most common), you can download their ImageStudio software, which will channel you to a 30-free trial at SpotLife, where you can schedule live shows or store older videos. After you figure out how to do it with this proprietary software, you can either shop around for a service or do it yourself.
Real is a profit-making business, so they don't make it easy to find their free stuff. First, you should download Real Producer Basic. Go to the very bottom of the page and click on the under Free Products for Evaluation. They're going to ask for some demographic information from you, so it's not really free free.
You might note RealJukebox and RealPresenter while you're there.
The help and documentation on Real's site, especially their DevZone, is thorough
and readable.
I found a couple of third-party sites that may be useful, too: Encoding with
RealProducer at Boston University.
The step-by-step at TechTV, Encoding
with RealProducer G2, is written for the $$ version, but it adapts easily to
the free version.
Finally, the hosting company VirtualScape has a Producing
Video guide that I found useful.
Streaming Media World's Mastering Audio for
the Internet
by John Townley
SMW: Streaming Basics: Editing Video for Streaming
Basically, you have four steps to take:
using Real Producer
Basic, create an audio or video file or convert one you already have to the .ra or .rm
format.
using Notepad, create a
Real metafile that calls the audio file.make a text file that
ends ".ram" which contains the full URL to the media clip.
using FrontPage, link to
the Real metafile from your page in one of two ways -- with the player
displaying on the page or the player popping up as a separate window. In your
HTML document, you link to the .ram file, not the .rm file.
using WS_FTP, FTP the
three files -- the audio file, the Real metafile, and the .htm file -- to your
Parkside Plaza web. This will download the tiny .ram file, pass that on to
realplayer, and it will then load the .rm and play it as it is being downloaded.
You can do the same with Windows Media, video clips in .mpg or mpeg format. The small file's name ends with .asx.
The computer must be able to download the file FASTER than it takes to play the sound. So, for example, if it is a 3 minute audio clip, then the file should be small enough that it can be downloaded in less than 3 minutes. Of course, a high-speed connection can download a lot more in three minutes than a dialup connection, so you have to know your audience.
Test it to make sure it works. Have fun!
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