This page is still under construction.

Putting music or sound on a website used to be a lot easier than it is today. A lot of the difference is in the way embedded objects and Flash are no longer handled by Internet Explorer after losing a copyright suit to a company called EOLA for Microsoft's illegal use of ActiveX code. Beginning with IE 7 (and updates made for IE 6), ActiveX no longer works right.

For a complete list of known audio file formats, go to this list. It opens in a new window so you won't lose your place here.

Let's start with the most commonly-used types of sound you might want to put on your site, and a little bit about each:

So which should you use?

The first factor to consider is what do most internet users use?

The answer is Windows Media Player, which plays .M3U, .MID, .MP3, .WAV and .WMA files.

The second factor is what is the smallest file size without a noticeable loss of quality?

.MID files are by far the smallest and, with the right equipment on the user's computer can sound fabulous. Most professional musicians use .MID files for recording their instrumental track because of the ease with which they can change instruments and other parameters. The problem is, most of the cheaper computers today come with terrible-sounding sound cards ... though they are better than they used to be.

While .MP3 files are the "accepted standard" today, many Internet music pros are turning to the Ogg Vorbis (.OGG) format because it makes a smaller file size and sounds better than .MP3.