Offering Multiple Links to the Same Audio

Although the owners of each streaming format would like you to believe that their format is the best (and most popular), average home users don't care which format you use as long as it works. Listeners might or might not have any one or more players for these formats on their computer. One of the best ways to ensure that the user can easily listen to your audio is to make it available in more than one format actually, in as many formats as possible. In some cases, this might not be realistic. At the very least, provide two formats. By providing multiple formats, you can also track what your audience prefers and even ask your listeners which format they find to be the most reliable and stable. Remember to include links to the Web sites from which your listeners can download the relevant players. Your listener might not have the most recent version of a particular player, and new players are easily downloaded and installed.

NOTE

If you are streaming audio for a small group of private users (such as a corporate intranet or a family Web site), you can get away with using a single format.

Including multiple formats on your site is a straightforward process. When authoring your on-demand files, simply author to multiple formats, upload as usual, create metafiles, and link to each. When providing multiple formats for a live stream, you need to author a separate stream for each format. This will likely require multiple authoring and serving computers. It's easy for listeners to become confused with many links to the same audio content, so spend a little extra time designing your Web page to clearly identify each format's link. Consider encouraging one format (offering the others as backups) to potentially take some of the guesswork out of a listener's experience. Listeners without knowledge of the various formats shouldn't have to decide between one and the other. You can organize your streaming files by placing the link for each format next to the information that identifies that particular file (a common practice), or you can organize your files in groups based on the format. It's important to have your page look good, of course, but it's more important that listeners be able to use it.