Sound Test
Adding Sound to Web Pages

The simplest and most unobtrusive method, use a simple link code:

<A href="heymama.wav">Play It Now!</a>

Play It Now!

Of course, it is so unobtrusive it may be overlooked and, when I tested it, it gave me the "You Have Chosen To Download a File" message that confuses or worries some visitors who are new to the internet. As with any standard link, you could also use a graphic for this method. O'Reilly's Web Design in a Nutshell has this to say about this method:

"If the browser uses an external player, a new small window will open with controls for playing audio. If the browser is configured to use a plug-in player (such as the popular QuickTime plug-in), a control panel may load right in the browser window, replacing the original web page! You may want to advise readers to use the Back button to return to the original page if this should happen."

"It is also good web design from to warn readers of the size of the audio file so they can make informed decisions whether they want to spend the time downloading."

One of the most popular methods is the use of the <embed> tag. Created by Netscape, Internet Explorer began supporting it in 3.0 so a large majority of your visitors should be able to see and use this. There are a number of attributes that this tag can take, some of them are discussed below.

<embed src="abrain.wav" CONTROLS="console" HEIGHT=60 width=145 autostart="false">Where did It Go?</embed>

Where did It Go?

My internal system anyway put a rather ugly icon in for me to double click, haven't looked at what I would see online (using Netscape). The "rather ugly icon" is probably ugly because it is controlled by the height and width settings I gave for the console. The most important attribute above as far as our visitors go is autostart which gives or takes away control from the visitor. With a value of false the visitor can choose to initiate the sound, with a value of true the visitor gets the sound but in combination with console, may choose to STOP it.

Internet Explorer has a tag, <bgsound>, which puts the sound in the background of the page. By combining this tag with the <embed> tag from netscape with it's attributes set as autostart="true" and hidden="true" you can achieve background sound for a majority of visitors but this gives no method to turn the music off.
The above is only a bare beginning on placing sound on one's page. Below are some links to further information.