Web Whiz Bang: The Pros and Cons of Adding FLASH to your site

Add audio to a page

There are a number of ways of getting audio onto a web page. The best choice depends on the amount of sound you are using, the

• .wav,.aiff - audio file formats designed for PCs and Macs respectively
• RealAudio - a highly compressed, streamed, audio file format
  

  Sound Files (wav, aiff, au)

  • author has to digitize sound files in appropriate file format (cross platform compatibility can be a problem)
  • files are very large (between 8 and 44 K per second)
  • to minimize file size: reduce sampling rate, record in mono, reduce length of recording
  • server has to be configured to serve the file format (usually already done)
  • user must have appropriate plug-in or helper application (commonly available, free)
  • useful for very short, high quality clips (syllables, phonemes, words)
    

  *Real Audio

  helper application that allows reasonable quality sound files to be played
  RealAudio files are much smaller than other sound files (1 - 2 k per second)
  ReadAudio can also start playing before the whole file has been downloaded.

  • author has to digitize sound files, then encode them using RealAudio Encoder
  • RealAudio Server must be installed on a web server
  • author has to have access to RealAudio folders on server to upload files
  • small file size compared to other audio file formats, fast streaming
  • to minimize file size: reduce sampling rate, record in mono, reduce length of recording
  • user must have RealAudio Player (downloadable free)