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| Audio For Web - How to Install Audio on a Web Page - Multimedia Audio Tips Audio for Web, A overview and primer to help you with installing audio on your website In the world of audio there are revolutionary changes going on. What required a fully loaded professional recording studio 10 years ago can now be done on an average personal computer. These revolutionary changes are beginning to intersect with the Worldwide Web and are opening up avenues for creative and original uses for sound. All of the major web browsers have the ability to play a variety of audio (as well as video) formats, and including these formats in a web page is as easy as including a graphic element. The trouble is that our internet bandwidth is limited, and we need to look into ways around the bandwidth bottleneck. Installing audio for web pages? - Audio for web needs small file sizes for optimum user friendlyness. As with graphics, audio for web pages works best when the files are small and this means- compression. When you put a graphic up on a web page you first need to make an optimized version of the original. To “optimize” a file is to shrink it down to a reasonable size that allows the user to display it quickly without choking as it comes through the Internet connection, while still retaining a reasonable viewing/listening quality. Compressing Audio for web achieves the same file size optimization and done appropriately enhances the user experience. Creating audio for web - Audio files can be large depending on the quality needed for music or voice. At full resolution, digital audio files are large. Audio from a compact disc is 44.1 khz, 16 bit stereo. That means every minute of audio takes up 10 megabytes. That's too much even for a fast modem to play well. We'll go over a few tricks to shrink down the file to a manageable size for web use and hopefully you will be sounding off like a pro in no time. When you reduce the file size of an audio for web clip you also reduce the quality of the sound. 22.05 khz, 8-bit mono is a standard format for Lo-Fi applications like CD-ROMs. This format is good for voice but not so good for music. Files at this size are one-eighth the size of standard CD quality audio (44.1 khz, 16 bit stereo.) Mono files are automatically half the size of stereo files of the same length because they are only one (mono) track rather than two (stereo) tracks. So consider mono for you audio for web if its spoken word. Preparing multimedia audio for web - Use your ears and watch the file sizes. For short clips like sound effects or clicks for buttons etc. it's sometimes easiest to simply use a wave or aiff file shrunk down to 22.05 khz, 8-bit mono, or smaller. For good Audio for web use your ears to decide what an acceptable audio quality. You want the smallest size while retaining an audio quality you can live with. Even at the 22.05 khz, 8-bit mono size you will bog down trying to play a music file of any length more than a second or two. If you want to have background music playing on a web page you probably should use a MIDI file or streaming audio. Read about this in part two. Part Two Continued... Audio For Web - How to Install Multimedia Audio on Your Web Page - File Formats for Audio for web CONTINUED... |
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