Background Audio Selector

Part 1 : Introduction

There are several problems with embedding sound files into a web page.

• Firstly sound files tend to be relatively large resulting in your page being very slow to load.
• Secondly the HTML commands to embed a sound file differ between browsers. The object tag that is the standard way to attach sound files is only supported by the latest browsers and even they expect different attributes in order to work. Earlier Netscape versions expect the now obsolete embed tag while earlier Internet Explorer versions expect the completely non-standard bgsound tag.
• Thirdly, the music will stop playing when your visitor changes to a different web page.
• Finally, playing music on your web page without asking first if your visitor wants to hear the music is the quickest way to drive people away from your site.

The solution to this is to link to your music files from your web page. This means that the music isn't downloaded until after your page has been displayed (making it display much faster) and the music only gets downloaded to be played when your visitor clicks on the link so they are actually asking to play the music. Because the music then plays in whatever software that they normally use to play music files, in many cases the music will continue to play in the background even after they move on to the next web page.

This solves the web based problems associated with placing music files on your site. The other issue you need to deal with is copyright. Unless the pieces of music that you are uploading are your own original composition played by yourself then you will need to get permission from whoever holds the rights to the particular piece of music. This might be the composer, it might be the music company that sells the music, it might be the arranger who has arranged the particular version (common with classical music where the composer is long deceased), it might be the artist who plays the music, or it might be the person who converted the music into the particular format that you are uploading to your site. You can be sure in 99.999% of cases that even for music that is hundreds of years old, someone has an interest in the particular version of the music and you need their permission to be able to upload it to your site. Make sure that you ask them for public broadcast rights as making music available is considered to be a public broadcast. I have heard of cafes and doctors surgeries being fined thousands of dollars just for playing a radio where patrons/patients can hear it without holding a public broadcast licence and the music industry pursue breaches on the internet quite strictly as well.

So now that we have determined that the music that we have on our site is allowed to be there let's see what the background audio selector box looks like on different browsers and decide if this is what you want for your page.