BODY OF THE BOOK - Part C

A WORD ABOUT AUDIO CONTENT

   You can also insert audio in an ebook, just as you would on a website. The top two choices are MP3 files or, again, Flash files. The MP3 is very common and most people are familiar with it; Flash - while playable on most all computers and operating systems - is harder to program on your end. An MP3 file can run pretty large, too, so you might want to keep them short or break them into smaller files. Depending on how do your HTML coding on your web page, it may or may not play in all browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, AOL, etc.).

   Here are two methods that will work, with somewhat varying results. The first will, in some browsers, open the music in a new window. The second method is the simplest and works with Firefox/Netscape as well as Internet Explorer. It is also the simplest: just click the link.

METHOD B
Listen to "Morning Breeze I" by Anugama from "Caveman - Before the World" album!

   NOTE: The audio content on this page is quite large - the page would take 2,465 seconds to load over a dial-up connection of 56Kb per second (89 seconds over a T1 fast connection).

    So how do I make it work? Just copy the code below and replace the filename and link text (in bold) with your own MP3 file (Just remember to paste it into NotePad first!).

   So what if I want to play several sound files, like an album? Go into Windows Media Player (WMP) and load the songs you want, then create a WPL playlist and copy it to your ebook folder. Your link, instead of looking like the one above, will look like the one below. Having WMP open in another window can be a distraction from the content of your ebook - so there has to be a better way, right? Stay tuned for my next ebook on the subject.

Listen to the album by Anugama - Windows Media Player (WMP)
This will open up WMP in its own window. It has only two songs to keep the size smaller.

   Understood? OK, here's the alternative method. Just follow these steps to create an MP3 playlist and convince Windows, MacOS X, and Linux browsers to play the songs in sequence, in the background, for as long as your page is displayed or until the end of the last song, repeating if desired. See the end of this entry for technical notes... and be sure to read them first if you think you've spotted a mistake on my part!

Step One. Upload the MP3 files to your web site. I'll assume your site is called www.example.com and the files are in a folder called example with the names a.mp3, b.mp3, c.mp3 and d.mp3.

Step Two. With plain old Windows Notepad or any other text editor, create a new text file called playlist.m3u. Place the following lines in the file:

http://www.example.com/example/a.mp3
http://www.example.com/example/b.mp3
http://www.example.com/example/c.mp3
http://www.example.com/example/d.mp3

Step Three. Save the playlist.m3u file and upload it to the example folder of your web site, www.example.com.