Chapter 33. Audio on the Web

Simple audio files found their way onto the Web in its earliest days when they could be linked to and downloaded like any other file. The drawback to this technique is that traditional audio files are generally quite large and may take a prohibitively long time to download. As the Web evolved, some major breakthroughs have been made in web audio. First, streaming audio (files that play as they download) made long-playing audio and even live broadcasts possible. Then the MP3 format exploded into popularity around 1999. MP3's ability to crunch audio files to one-tenth their original size while maintaining very good quality made it a perfect solution for sharing music over the Internet.

Obviously, audio, even specialized for the Web, is a rich and complex topic that cannot be thoroughly treated in a single chapter of a Nutshell reference book. This chapter introduces general audio concepts and a number of popular web audio file formats, including MP3, QuickTime, RealAudio, Windows Media, Flash audio, MIDI, and AAC. It also discusses the many options for adding audio to a web site. It begins with an introduction to basic audio terminology that will be useful to know when it comes time to create and optimize sound files.