Adding Audio to a Website

Say you’d like to record a personal voice greeting for your web visitors, or maybe you’d like to add a song to your home page, Peter Lupton has some information to share on the subject: “Wav is currently the most popular audio file format because it is the format defined and endorsed by Microsoft and used by Windows based computers. Today wav files are supported by most platforms and by Netscape and the Internet Explorer.

Wav files can have a range of sample rates and different sample types. Without going into the technical detail, PCM is the purest audio format, and offers much better sound quality than other compressed formats such as ADPCM or Real Audio. The downside is that file sizes are large. A high sample rate provides better quality audio but has a much larger file size. Similarly, 16 bit PCM gives less hiss but has a file size double that of 8 bit PCM. As a general rule, you will not viably be able to embed an autostart file which is longer than 10 seconds. To have longer recordings you will need to use Real Audio (see below).

For a reasonable quality short voice prompts we recommend 11.025kHz, 8 bit PCM Wav Files.

To record and edit a wav file download a sound editor.”

Read the full text at Audio Amigo. Links so audio editing software are available as well.