Sound

When searching for sound or music backgrounds for your website, remember that the majority of visitors to your website will have the average dial-up modem, which means that large sound files will take some time to load.

If the file takes time to download to your computer, it will take the same time for others. If the file takes time to email to your website designer, it will take the same time for others.

It's not the number of minutes the piece plays, it's the density of the sound that makes up the size of the file. e.g. A flute music file is smaller than that of a big band or orchestra playing for the same length of time.

The sound or music may appeal to you, but it may not appeal to others. You can't please everyone. Don't bank on everybody hearing the music or sound. Many people leave their speakers turned off.

Download a player: www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/ www.apple.com/quicktime/products/qt/ http://forms.real.com/real/player/ www.real.com/realone www.musicmatch.com

Good quality format is MP3. But whatever the format, your visitors need to have an appropriate Windows Media Player, Quick Time, RealAudio, RealOne, Music Match, Nero etc. 'plugin' installed.

Even if they have those pluggins, if the sound file is large, it may play in broken up pieces (packets) as it is downloaded to a visitor's computer. If it's a 15 minute song but the file takes 30 minutes to load and it plays the packets as they are received, then there would be gaps in the sound equal to the time of each packet of sound plays.

Flash can play streaming audio to avoid those pauses.

MIDI files are smaller because they are computer generated rather than audio converted to digital. The low quality background sound on this page is from a MIDI file. A higher quality version on MP3 format may have taken 200 times as long to load.

Click here for a selection of background sounds which we are accumulating