Adding music and sound to your site

The code to add music for Internet Explorer is as follows:
<bgsound src="path and name of your midi file.mid"> 

Also make sure to substitute the path and name of your midi file with your own.
EXAMPLE:<bgsound src="midi/startrek.mid>

The code to add music for Netscape can be any combination of the following:

<embed img src="mid1.mid" width="144" height="15" controls="smallconsole" autostart="true" autoload="true" loop="3"></embed>

Remember that for every tag you open, you must have a closing tag such as <Embed></Embed>
The autoload will automatically load your music. In order for your music to start playing automatically, you must have the autostart set to true. If you set autostart="false", the music will only start playing when the "Play" button on the control panel is pressed.

The loop tag will make the music repeat as many times as you have specified by the number in this tag. loop="3" will repeat 3 times and then quit. If you don't included this statement it will play once and then quit. 

A similar tag is the repeat="true" which causes the file to loop until the "Stop" button on the console is pressed.
If you set the tag to repeat="false" or do not include this tag at all the music will stop after it has played once. 
 
 

If you want to enable your visitors to choose their own music, or not have any music at all you might consider adding.
<A HREF="mid1.mid"> The name of the music selection</A> The mid1.mid is the name of "The music selection you have chosen" as it is named your directory. The part in green is the description that will actually appears on the web page and what people will see and click on to get the file to play. Remember to substitute your own file and description. Click on the following link to hear the song "Robots". You can add WAV files to your page in this same manner.

Robots

SAVING YOUR MIDI FILES:
You can save the midi files by holding your mouse over the player that comes up and hitting your right mouse button. Select "Save As" from the pop-up menu. A new screen will appear asking you what directory and name you want to save the file to. The default will be Untitled.mid. Remember if you don't rename the song it will overwrite any song you may have saved previously with the same name.
 

Complications could arise:
It is really vary easy to add music to your site by using any of the code above, but one can still run into unexpected complications. When I first published my site on my local server I had major problems with my midi. It would play on Internet Explorer but not properly on Netscape.Instead of the proper black player that is supposed to come up with Netscape I got the following WARNING every time I tried to access my page.

While in this case this is a harmless warning, I must admit the first time I saw it I did tend to panic a bit. Once I read the warning carefully and realized what it was trying to do. I hit the continue button and was presented with 

I had to double click on the image above in order to bring up the Microsoft Mplayer and then hit the start button on the player. 

Even though this did work, it was not what I wanted to present my visitors with. I know HTML and went over my code what seemed like 5000 times and knew logically that the code and the way I had constructed my page should work. I knew that everything was fine on my end so it had to be something missing on the computer I had published my pages to. As a next step to solve my problem I used all the major search engines to search for any mention of midi, embed, and Netscape. Though this was a long and tedious process, it finally paid off when I started coming up with pleas for help from others with similar problems. Some were simple answers like things missing in their midi commands. such as forgetting to add the autostart to their code, but some stated problems with the Mime. What is Mime you may ask it stands for (Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions), however every document transmitted on the web has it's own mime type. This includes a header sent by the server that tells your browser what kind of data is being sent. The format is type/sub-type. For any plug-in to function, with Netscape Navigator it requires that the correct MIME type be sent by the server.

If your not sure what Mime Type your server is sending out, go to the View menu on Netscape then select Document Info you will be presented with a page similar to the one below. It contains all the information about the particular web page your viewing. You must access the page from the net as no MIME types are sent when you view pages on your own computer. This is why the page works correctly on your computer but may not on the web. Double click on the file you wish the information on and it will appear on the lower half of the page. 
 
 

The reason my sound didn't work in Netscape was that it was expecting File MIME Type:audio/x-midi and it was receiving File MIME Type: application/octet-stream.

Here is the correct information for the audio plugin installed in Netscape: 

LiveAudio

File name: C:\PROGRAM FILES\NETSCAPE\NAVIGATOR\PROGRAM\plugins\NPAUDIO.DLL
LiveAudio - Netscape Navigator sound playing component: 
____________________________________________
Mime Type    Description     Suffixes            Enabled
audio/x-wav    WAV              wav                 Yes
audio/wav       WAV              wav                 Yes
audio/x-midi    MIDI              mid, midi          Yes 
audio/midi       MIDI              mid, midi          Yes 

In order to get sound to play on your site, your server has to be willing to help you. There are sites that have this problem and I hope this tutorial will set your mind at ease and you will accept and listen to the music they have to offer.

Important Notice! Before you use music on your web pages, it is important to note that many music selections are copyrighted, by the original composers. You should make sure that you comply with the terms for using their music by going to the their sites, and reading their copyright notices. This is a very small courtesy for the pleasure their wonderful music brings us.