AUDIO & VIDEO FOR WEB PAGES

STREAMING AUDIO & VIDEO

MP3s are the best all round file format for audio on the internet, I recommend Soundforge on PC or iTunes on Mac to convert a .wav or .aif file to mp3. Avoid Real Audio, many people (including me) do not like it as the application seems to take over your entire computer.

The correct way to stream audio to work well with most browsers is to use a stub file along with the actual audio file. The link points to the stub file, which is merely a text, file which in turn points to the audio file.

One problem with this is that the stub file will be downloaded onto the end user’s computer as soon as the click on the link. Again many people, including me, will find this annoying and you may find that embedding a player is a better and more elegant solution.

• Create audio file (eg tune.mp3)
• Upload to your site. It is handy to create a specific folder for audio and name it sounds or audio
• Open notepad, type in the address of the audio file: http://www.your-url.com/sounds/tune.mp3
• Save the file as tune.m3u, NOT tune.txt
• Upload this to your site, you might want to create a folder for stub files and name it stubs
• Create the link to this file in your HTML page:

(This can be the relative path as in this example or the absolute path which includes the full URL http://www.etc)

For Real Audio the same applies, but stub files should be saved with the extension *.ram and the audio file has the extension *.ra or *.rm

The next tutorial covers embedding audio & video