Music on a website

April · Post by **April** » Sunday Apr 06, 2003

Does anybody know the best way to put a song on your website so that it doesn't take a long time for someone to download it? Isn't there a way for you to put it there so they can just click on it and hear it right away or in a short period of time? My songs take forever on my site. Too long for anybody to bother with them.

JimmySkinny · Post by **JimmySkinny** » Monday Apr 07, 2003

well you could stream the songs with real media, but often with that the sound quality is pretty poopy. one thing i would highly suggest is looking into mp3.com

no dice ( www.nolucknodice.com ) hosts all our songs on mp3.com and they do a great job. they allow users to stream in 2 formats

-lo-fi (56k connection)
-hi-fi (broadband)
and also allow users to download them if you allow it.

its great because you can use mp3.com's servers to host your songs and save your bandwidth on other things for your site

April · Post by **April** » Thursday Apr 10, 2003

just tried that, but you have to have copyright permission to put cover songs on there and I'm not really sure how to get that. I just want to put a few cover songs on my site so people can get the jist of our sound without having to waste a lot of time to do it. Any other ideas?

Post by **Ron** » Thursday Apr 10, 2003

Hi April,

If your viewers are using a dial-up connections, they have two choices:

1) Wait for the song to download, then listen to it with good quality.
2) Have the song stream at extemely reduced quality.

It sounds like you have #1 already implemented on your site. #2 is not worth it since the sound quality is so bad.

If a viewer has a good broadband web connection and the correct software, #1 will actually stream off of your site.

In other words, listening to music over the web isn't very practical for dial-up connections.

facingwest · Post by **facingwest** » Tuesday Apr 15, 2003

I have some software that'll let you convert a wave into an .ra format. Once you convert it and upload it, you can stream the files you want people to hear pending on their connection rate. The better connection rate someone has, the better quality the file will be. Anyone who has Real Player can listen to the tunes on your site. One thing you might want to look into is how to make it stream on your site. The file will be saved as an .ra format, however, you have to do a few steps and the file that's going to be put into your html code has to be a .ram format (if only the .ra file is present in the code, the file won't stream). The encoder for this can be found at www.download.com. I don't know if they'll have the older version of it, but the new one, I believe limits you to what all you can do with it. If you can't find it on that site, I can always send a copy if needed.

John

www.retroactiverocks.com

Eric618 · Post by **Eric618** » Tuesday Oct 28, 2003

Best way is to convert the tracks to .mp3 format. On the sites I do where there is audio, i usually have two choices. One is a small clip of the song that is very compressed, so it either streams or downlaods quickly at the cost of quality, and also the full versions that are not as compressed so there isn't *too* much loss of quality from the original file. You can check out what I mean at www.SimonSezJump.com on the downloads page. And now for the shamless plug.....You can check out my web design page at www.KnuckleheadDesigns.com

Thanks
Eric