Sound File Formats

Sound Files | Sound File Formats

Sound File Formats

Some of the most popular sound file formats for the Macintosh are AU, AIFF, and MPEG audio. AU (also often referred to as u-law, after its most widely used sound sampling scheme) has the advantage of being available on a wide variety of systems. So if you choose to link to AU files in your Web pages, people viewing your pages from PCs, Macs, and Unix machines should all be able to hear the sounds. On the other hand, AU files have rather poor sound quality.
If you are only concerned with other Mac users hearing your audio files, you can treat them to much higher quality sound with the AIFF format.
MPEG audio can also be of very good quality, at least according to the technical specifications. There here are fewer tools for playing sounds recorded in this format, but that is beginning to change. For example, the Flash program discussed later allows streaming MPEG3 to be embedded in webpages.
MIDI is a very efficient format for many kinds of music and certain kinds of sounds. However, it is less well supported on the Web than the other formats and doesn't work well for things like voice (unless you want to sound like a computer).
Generally browsers do not have sound playing capabilities built-in, but can be easily configured to use other programs to play sounds which are sent to the browser. See the section on configuring your system for details of the helpers and plug-ins used to play various sound formats. Modern browsers increasingly incorporate sound plugins in the default installation.


			Sound Files \| Sound File Formats
		Sound File Formats Some of the most popular sound file formats for the Macintosh are AU, AIFF, and MPEG audio. AU (also often referred to as u-law, after its most widely used sound sampling scheme) has the advantage of being available on a wide variety of systems. So if you choose to link to AU files in your Web pages, people viewing your pages from PCs, Macs, and Unix machines should all be able to hear the sounds. On the other hand, AU files have rather poor sound quality. If you are only concerned with other Mac users hearing your audio files, you can treat them to much higher quality sound with the AIFF format. MPEG audio can also be of very good quality, at least according to the technical specifications. There here are fewer tools for playing sounds recorded in this format, but that is beginning to change. For example, the Flash program discussed later allows streaming MPEG3 to be embedded in webpages. MIDI is a very efficient format for many kinds of music and certain kinds of sounds. However, it is less well supported on the Web than the other formats and doesn't work well for things like voice (unless you want to sound like a computer). Generally browsers do not have sound playing capabilities built-in, but can be easily configured to use other programs to play sounds which are sent to the browser. See the section on configuring your system for details of the helpers and plug-ins used to play various sound formats. Modern browsers increasingly incorporate sound plugins in the default installation.