Free Music HTML Codes

Free Music HTML Codes are a good way to attract more visitors to your site. They also take advantage of the ability of the web to entertain more than just the eyes and brain, with the power of music.

Music can be delivered in many forms via the web. One of the earliest delivery methods took advantage of the embedded Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) in Apple's popular media player Quicktime. With some simple "embedded" commands, the web pages had a very small file size (less than 10k) yet they could play a complete polyphonic orchestral piece.

Of course, the sound was played through a tinny, electronic-tone-generating piece of software, with no dynamics, timbre, or certainly any vocals. While the innovation was fun for a while, users began to get annoyed by the tendency of enthusiastic web designers to make the players "auto-play" – a tendency that has unfortunately carried over into the world of MySpace players, Flash, and other Web 2.0 sites.

Quickly, people found that they really wanted to have better music on the web – but with different browsers, different platforms, and different musical file types, there was originally a huge mishmash of codes used. Some designers would embed the files in the web page – which slowed bandwidth down terribly. Others would simply put the files online as normal links, using basic free music HTML codes in the form of anchor tags:

This would make the downloadable file (MP3, .OGG, .AAC, .WAV) the users' responsibility to figure out how to play. Still not the best solution, but many artists and DJ's still use this method of simple downloading to spread their music.

As high-speed bandwidth became more widespread, new options became available to deliver music. Quicktime and RealPlayer developed "streaming" music – which would use an HTML tag to trigger the launch of their application on the user's computer, and the music would be piped in and played through. Macromedia (later purchased by Adobe) developed the Flash platform, which both shrank file size immensely and increased the ability of the web browser to stream audio and video. Microsoft came late to the party, but they also developed a streaming capability in their Windows Media Player, and with the ubiquity of the Windows Platform it became used constantly.

Almost all of these platforms became "web aware" – that is, they developed either the capability to play within the browser or to automatically launch the necessary application when the user clicked on the link. For example, to listen to the latest episode of the popular music program Accident Hash, you can click on the flash player, which is embedded along with the page's [RSS Feeds Filetype:RSS|RSS feed] using this code:

…followed by several parameters. Most of this HTML is generated by either the Flash application that designed the page or (with podcasts especially) by the hosting service, such as Libsyn.

An example of the HTML needed to launch something like Windows Media is " Absolute Radio (formerly Virgin Radio) which uses active server pages (ASX) to launch the variable-bit-rate stream. Variable bit rate helps the music play more smoothly; the service offers 128k stereo streaming via their site. The HTML link is:

Trying to describe all of the ways to deliver music on the web is far beyond the scope of this article. However, there are some simple steps to keep in mind:

1. Know your audience: if your users aren't likely to have high-speed internet, then streaming hi-fi or large file downloads will probably not work well.
2. Avoid annoying: remember that many people don't want music to start playing unless they start it; if you must have music start on your page, make sure there's an obvious way to stop it.
3. Stay current: All the media player sites above are constantly upgraded and (hopefully) improving their delivery methods. It's a good idea to check them regularly to make sure the HTML you are using on your site is still effective and efficient in delivering the music you want.

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