Adding Sound to your Web Site

The eteamz folks made adding sounds to your site very easy. However, there are areas on your site where the "add sound" button isn't available, such as the roster and profile pages. Perhaps you want to add hidden background music or maybe your own player. Using HTML to add sound or background music to your eteamz site is easier than you think. Basically, anywhere that you can add text on your site, you can add HTML code for sound. With the examples below we use the .mid file extension. Please note however that the .wav file extension will also work.

A MIDI file, a file that ends with the extension .mid, is essentially a small file with instructions that tell your sound card how to play a song. The better your sound card, the better it will sound. All of the actual playing is done on YOUR computer. You cannot 'record' existing sounds with MIDI.

WAV & RA files, files that end with the extension .wav or .mp3 or .ra, are digital recordings of a sound or song. They are much like a cassette tape or CD. Because there is so much information contained in the .mp3,.wav, or .ra files, they tend to be HUGE. When compressed, the .mp3 and .ra files size can be smaller than .wav files and with less quality loss. Both files however are still sizeable. Long .wav, .mp3, and .ra files can be anywhere from 500k to 3 MEGS or more! The eteamz folks recommend keeping the sounds on each page under 100k, and we agree. Anything over 300k is very large for a web page unless the user has broadband,and having your viewers upload a large sound file will make the site take a lot longer to load and possibly drive away your guests.

If you play music or sounds, we think that MIDI files give you an obvious advantage for music and sound with your computer, as long as you do not depend on original live sound recordings.

Tips:
How do I find the music file address on my site? If the file is a sound you uploaded, in Admin, click on the "uploads" folder, and then click on the "sounds" sub-folder. This will show all of the sound files that you uploaded. The file extension that you are looking for is between the (parentheses). If the file is named "Pink Panther (pinkpanther.mid)" the address is "/yoursitename/sounds/pinkpanther.mid"

How do I find a eteamz music file address? All eteamz music files are under "/admin/sounds/filename.mid". Usually the "filename" is the song title, for example Pink Panther is "/admin/sounds/pinkpanther.mid".

Within the follow codes, edit the blue text. Change "/yoursitename" to your actual eteamz address, "/sounds" is the folder that the music file is stored in, and "/filename.mid" is the full name of the sound file you are using; for example, "/pinkpanther.mid".

Adding the following HTML code will display a small music player which can be clicked to start and stop the music. The EMBED command works on both Netscape Navigator 2.0 + and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 +. Although the tag works a lot like Explorer's BGSOUND, some attributes are different.

SRC= Enter the name of the sound file you wish to use, like "/example.mid" or "/example.wav".

AUTOSTART= Using this attribute will tell the browser to play a sound automatically by entering "TRUE" as the Value. The sound will NOT start automatically if you enter "FALSE" as the Value.

LOOP= In Netscape, you can tell the browser to play the sound over and over in an endless Loop by entering "TRUE" as the Value. You can tell the browser to play the sound ONCE by entering "FALSE" as the Value. (Internet Explorer does not recognize this attribute. Use PLAYCOUNT= as shown below for IE.)

PLAYCOUNT= Entering a number "2" or "5" etc., will tell Internet Explorer how many times to play the sound. (Netscape does not recognize this attribute.)

WIDTH= and HEIGHT= These attributes define the appearance and size of the panel it creates.

The default eteamz player or the above coding for the embedded player for RA files will work. These players however are not really configured for the Realplayer files. Example: autoplay works for .wav & .midi files, but not for .ra and the player looks strange running .ra files; small play button, etc.

• Download Quick Time (Audio/Video Player)
• Download Real Player (Audio/Video Player)
• Download Windows Media Player (Audio/Video Player)