Adding audio or video to your website is a definite plus these days. Increasing your chances of extra revenue generation. Streaming audio/video generally serves two purposes. One being entertainment value, and the other, more practical and useful in our case, is the generation of income by using the technology to demonstrate and promote your products.

Until fairly recently, professional website designers were wary of adding multi-media streams to a website. But now the spread of high speed broadband internet connections has removed the barrier for the use of such additions. There is still a lot to consider, so for the time being let us deal with audio streams, and save the video for another article.

Audio files have differing formats, the most popular currently being the MP3 and MIDI. What exactly is a MIDI and an MP3, and what are the differences? I have described a few sound file formats below, together with their various attributes to help you decide which to use in your website.

MIDI is a music file type that utilises the built in devices in your computer sound card, making the file size pretty lightweight. However sound cards vary enormously, so playing a MIDI file on two different computers with different sound cards is likely to produce different results. Another problem with MIDI files is that they can sound rather like the ring tones of old cell phones. This could give your website a distinctly amateurish feel. This is to be avoided. You don't want to be labelled an amateur when you are selling something. Of course the plus side is that because of their small size, people on dial-up connections will appreciate the load speed of your site.

MP3 is an audio file which is highly compressed, achieving a smaller file size. People using DSL connections will probably download a 5mb MP3 file in under a minute. Dial-up connections will typically take 3 to 5 minutes to download a single song of average playing time.

Because of its compressed nature, sounds from MP3 files are not as good as from your CD player. Also you will need to "loop" these files to get them to play continuously whilst, for instance, people surf your site. Looping is not easy with MP3's. A big drawback is that you require specific MP3 programs to play the files, and when someone enters a site using these files your Real Player, or Windows Media Player, might open automatically to play them, spoiling the effect.

In terms of quality, the best sound file format is the WAV file. Using this format will give you studio quality audio. However the indisputable problem with these files is their size. Even with fast broadband connection, a browser will have a tough time loading a web page using WAV for its audio stream.

When trying to incorporate audio streams into your website, familiarity with flash files is an advantage. To make music play continuously you will need to loop your file. WAV files go through the looping process with no problems, but MP3 and MIDI files will need to be associated with flash files to achieve this.

All in all, you need to decide exactly what it is you wish to achieve with your audio, and make your choice accordingly. Don't be afraid to experiment to get the result you are after. After all, as you can see, there are several ways to add background sound to your web pages, and you will undoubtedly be pleased that you did.