Presented by Peruvian Dreams by Waystein (Stein Arne Rimehaug).

The use of MIDI on Web pages has increased dramatically over the past two years. Many of the better places to find MIDI music are listed in the Net Links . If you have been thinking about adding MIDI to your personal home page, here is how to do it.

There are basically two ways a MIDI file can be used on a Web page - as a hypertext link that can be clicked on or as an embedded file (background music) which plays automatically when the page is loaded (like on this page). Embedded files are loaded along with the rest of the page, so the MIDI file is downloaded to the user's computer whether or not the user chooses to do so.

Therefore, there is some controversy about using embedded files, with some people arguing passionately against their use. Charles Kelley offers such an argument in Many MIDI File Lovers Hate Embedded MIDI Files and offers An Alternative to Embedding MIDI Files (that is, using a hypertext link).

I believe that embedded files can be properly used in many circumstances. For example, the music playing on this page now is from an embedded file. Most people know that this weekly column usually features such music, and they expect it. However, I avoid embedding very large files (over about 40K) because they slow down the loading of the page.

The following is a summary of the HTML code used to add MIDI to your site. If you use a Web page editor such as FrontPage or PageMill you may not deal directly with HTML code. However, I strongly urge you to learn the basics of it, since you can exert much more control over your pages this way.

Using MIDI on the Web -
Here's the Code!

It is relatively easy to add a hypertext link. The code is <A HREF="filename.mid">. For example, a link to a song entitled "Surfing" which has the file name "surfing.mid" might look like this:

Here is my newest song, entitled
<A HREF="surfing.mid">Surfing</A>. (This assumes that surfing.mid is in the same directory as your Web pages.)

To embed a MIDI file so that is plays in the background, the basic HTML syntax is as follows. This example, like the one given above, assumes that you have uploaded the MIDI file to the same directory where you keep your Web pages.

<EMBED SRC="surfing.mid" WIDTH="142" HEIGHT="58" AUTOSTART="TRUE" REPEAT="TRUE">

EMBED SRC="surfing.mid" specifies the MIDI file. WIDTH and HEIGHT are the size of the control panel that appears on the page. I like using the values 142 and 58, but you can experiment with making the panel larger or smaller.

You can hide the control panel by setting WIDTH="0" HEIGHT="2" This way, the music plays in the background but the viewer of the page cannot stop or restart it.

AUTOSTART="TRUE" is the default setting, causing playback to begin automatically when you open that page. If you set AUTOSTART="FALSE" playback will start only when the Play button in the control panel is pressed.

REPEAT="TRUE" causes playback to loop until the Stop button is pressed. If you set REPEAT="FALSE" or leave this code off entirely, the song will stop after it has played back once.

This will work on both Netscape and Internet Explorer browsers. Internet Explorer also has a tag called "background sound" which is very simple. For example, you can use <BGSOUND="surfing.mid"> to play the file in the background without displaying a control panel. However, this tag does not work with Netscape. Therefore, I recommend using the EMBED=SRC method since it works with both. Do not use both EMBED and BGSOUND tags. This will cause Explorer to play the file twice at the same time. If you are using FrontPage you must add this code manually, because entering a file name in the "background sound" dialogue box will use the Explorer-only code. (The first time an Explorer user encounters an embedded file the browser may indicate that a plug-in is needed. In this case I recommend using Crescendo or Beatnik. Netscape really doesn't need a plug-in, but you can use either of these).

To test your results, upload the HTML file to your server, connect to your site and see if the music plays correctly. Sometimes no problems are detected when the file is tested locally but show up when accessing it from a server. If you have a problem, especially if your browser displays text instead of playing music, your server may not be configured properly.

Unless you have your own server, you will have to ask your administrator to check the following settings. Just send an e-mail to your provider with your request and include the following:

[Server settings]

MIME type = audio/midi or audio/x-midi
action = binary
suffix = .mid
type = midi