File Formats for Web Pages With Audio
Preparing Multimedia Audio
About MIDI Files MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface)
MIDI is not an audio format. It does not record sound in any way. What it does do is let you record and play instructions that your sound card plays back through a synthesizer within it. This format is used a lot in popular music to play drum machines and synthesizers. Your sound card most likely has a synthesizer built in to it. The MIDI file is very very small because it is only a set of actions to be performed such as a musical note played at a particular time. It is similar to a player piano in that the file tells the piano, or in this case the synth, to play a note.
The benefit to using MIDI files is that you can have a very lengthy music file yet still have a small file size. The draw back is that you don't have complete control over how the file will sound on every end users sound card. Also, you can't have any singing on the file, because the file is not an audio recording. The bottom line with MIDI is that you can use midi files without adding any substantial size to your web page. You can find royalty free midi files easily with a Google search. We found this site that looks like a great place to get free files: http://www.partnersinrhyme.com/midi/
Streaming Audio
Streaming audio allows the user to start listening to the audio file while it is still downloading. Apples QuickTime and RealAudio (http://www.realaudio.com/) are some of the first players to offer this, and are probably still the best known. Macromedia's Shockwave also streams audio files. This link will take you to where you can download the player if you don't already have it: http://sdc.shockwave.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?
With streaming audio the sound is downloaded into a buffer before being sent to the soundcard. The file will start playing soon after downloading begins, and will keep playing smoothly as long as the file download happens faster than the file plays. You get choking sometime, especially if you start downloading/uploading another file to or from the internet while the file plays.
You can create a streaming audio file easily with an audio editor such as Sony's Sound Forge, Steinberg's Wave Lab, or Bias' Peak. You just save your original high quality audio file as a RealAudio file (.ra or .ram) format. Your web server must have the RealAudio extensions installed, and your hosting service might charge extra for this option. As time goes by, more and more are offering it for free.
You can find examples of streaming audio at a local music web site that specializes in music from Humboldt County: http://www.humboldtmusic.com/
On the home page you can click on a link with “HumboldtMusic.com Radio” on it, and it will stream music from all local artists. Also you can scroll down to the bottom of the home page and choose individual bands/artists' music to play. Here is an example of an artist page with streaming media set for different connection speeds for dial up or high speed.
www.humboldtmusic.com/chadjohnson
www.humboldtmusic.com/smallfish
