Sounds can be embedded to provide background music (with or without a control to stop it) or linked to just as you would link to another page. Since sound files are often large it is good practice to indicate filesize and perhaps offer more than one quality or length of sample to allow for the huge variation of download speeds. Either way you are dependent on your audience having a suitable plug-in to play the sound - and headphones or speakers!

Embed a sound using this icon from Dreamweaver's Media tab on the Insert palette

Windows pcs have a standard Wave file format with a .wav suffix.
Macs traditionally use AIFF with .aif on the end of the filename.

Each can be recorded and saved at different sound qualities. The benchmark is cd quality at 44k stereo and 16 bit sampling, but for the Web the need for smaller file sizes means that 'qualities' such 22k mono at 8 bit has to be endured to prevent horrendous download times.

While wav and aiff are acceptable for short clips, background music would be too large to use in these formats. Instead you will find some sites using midi (musical instrument digital interface) files. These often sound simplistic and cheesy as they rely on synthesized electronic sounds which lack humanity and performance.

Mp3 has become the dominant way to record and distribute music for the web. The soundtrack layer of the Motion Picture Experts Group 'mpeg2' video format used for DVDs, mp3 offers 'near cd quality' sound with each song around 3mb - a tenth the size of .wav. The infamous success of Napster and legitimate sites such as Peoplesound.com means that most active members of your target audience will have a way to hear mp3 format files.

Quicktime sound and movie files can be controlled using the parameters button on the properties panel. Click here for some of the options

Mp3 is also fully supported by the Flash .swf animation format which also offers the most reliable way to create audio and visual interactivity for a website. If you want a multimedia website Flash is the way to go. All the Flash features are supported within a single downloadable plug-in which has a huge installed base already. You can also use a small Flash movie just to transmit sound. This can be useful to slip through college firewalls, to prevent easy copying and to make use of the Flash plug-in rather than taking pot-luck with the user's default media player which might be Windows Media Player, Real or Quicktime.

For more on Flash follow these links.

Insert Flash content using this icon from Dreamweaver's Media tab on the Insert palette.
      The filename ends with .swf  (The master authoring filename ends with .fla)

Macromedia's Director is the ultimate creation tool for multimedia. Responsible for nearly all interactive cd-roms, Director can create its magic for the web as a shockwave file with a .dcr suffix. These tend to be bigger and less well supported than Flash, with a much larger plug-in to download for those lacking it. While over ninety percent of browsers have the Flash plug-in, the number drops to just over half this for Shockwave. These users are a prime audience though, and many successful youth-orientated sites attract surfers with interactive shockwave games to create a 'sticky' or 'magnetic' site.

For more on Director and Shockwave follow these links.

Insert Director shockwave content using this icon from Dreamweaver's Media tab on the Insert palette.
      The filename ends with .dcr  (The master authoring filename ends with .dir)

An alternative for an html-based site was to use the Beatnik system. Beatnik was designed to allow buttons to make a sound when clicked and was a standard install with Pentium III pcs. As well as the default sounds you could create your own and also take advantage of its ability to play up to eight sounds at once to create chords and tunes. Sadly its developer Thomas Dolby's Headspace seems to have abandoned it and now creates polyphonic ringtones for mobile phones. Realplayer is one way to provide streaming audio and/or video. This means that the sound or video starts playing as soon as there is enough of it downloaded to the audience (there is no long wait before something happens as occurs with files which require that the entire clip is downloaded first). Although it enjoys a large base of enabled browsers and is required to use the BBC's listen again radio services, it can require some cost to the webmaster, unlike Apple's Quicktime alternative. Microsoft continues to exploit its monopoly with the Windows Media Player - also available for the Macintosh platform.

There are so many different competing compression/decompression 'codecs' that you may find yourself unable to play a downloaded file. One Windows solution may be gspot and have a look at 3ivx.

link test wav (15k)   link test wav (23k)   link test aiff (17k)  link test mp3 (12k)