You can find many sound files on the Internet. The most common format is Sun Microsystems .AU, which offers 8-bit u-law encoding and runs on all platforms. 8-bit sound does not offer quality reproduction, and the .WAV .AIFF formats for Windows and the Macintosh respectively, are better. Unfortunately, these do not play on both platforms. MPEG format is even higher-quality, but your machine must be equipped with a special card to play these file.
You can include links to sound files and video clips in your HTML pages. Because no current Web browser has internal support for these, and also because sound and video files are very large and take a long time to download, you must link to them externally.
To point to a multimedia file, use the external link:
It's a good idea to give the reader an idea of how big these files are, and also to write the exact format of the file. Writing their size in kilobytes will make you popular with readers who have only a slow link to the Internet. At this time, that's most of us! Even 28.8kbps modems are not fast enough for multimedia. Writing the format alerts the reader not to waste time on an incompatible file.
| Format | Extension | Runs on this Platform | AU/u-law | .AU | Unix | AIFF/AIFC | .AIFF | Macintosh | WAV | .WAV | Windows | SND | SND | Macintosh | MPEG | Audio | .MP2 (special board needed) |
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