Posted by Dung Ping on 12/29/05 16:58

cwdjrxyz@yahoo.com wrote:
> cwdjrxyz@yahoo.com wrote:
> > Dung Ping wrote:
> > > I placed following code in a page to play background sound on IE and FF
> > > respectively:
> > >
> > > <bgsound
> > > src='http://www.ibiblio.org/chinese-music/Taiwan_Ceremonial/J02.Plums_March.au'
> > > loop='-1' />
> > >
> > > <object>
> > > <embed
> > > src='http://www.ibiblio.org/chinese-music/Taiwan_Ceremonial/J02.Plums_March.au'
> > > loop='5'></embed>
> > > </object>
> > >
> > > However, when opened online with IE, there are double sounds, sounding
> > > that both pieces of code are working one after the other, with fraction
> > > of a second in between. But opened offline, there are no double
> > > sounds. Nor opened with FF.
> > >
> > > Following is the page. But the song is in Chinese. It may not be easy
> > > to detect the double sounds without some knowledge about the language.
> > >
> > > http://www.pinyinology.com/music/meihua.html
> > >
> > > Is there any problem with the code? Expertise is greatly appreciated.
> >
> > The problem with the code is that both bgsound and embed are hangovers
> > from the browser war era, and neither have ever been part of official
> > W3C html. Adding an object around embed does not make the code correct.
> > There are ways to handle the code correctly for modern html and media
> > players, but they can be a bit complicated.
> >
> > The bgsound tag is an IE(and close relatives) thing only, and would not
> > work on old Netscape or on the new Mozilla family browsers including
> > Firefox, Mozilla, and Netscape. An exception is that Opera may handle
> > bgsound, as it does many other Microsoft things, but I am not certain
> > about this.
> >
> > The embed tag(skip the object around it, and it does not need to be
> > closed) worked on the old Netscape. Early on it would not work on IE,
> > but at some point Microsoft added embed support for their browsers, so
> > today IE usually supports embed. Thus on Microsoft you likely have two
> > players working that are playing the same song with slightly different
> > start times. If you remove the bgsound code, operation likely will be
> > normal.
> >
> > I did not hear the song on my Firefox, but the problem was not the
> > code. Rather I just do not have a plugin assigned to play the .au
> > soundfile you use, so Firefox complained about that.. The .au sound
> > file is not used much anymore, so you may find a few others who do not
> > have a plugin set up for it on some or all of their browsers.
>
> It is easy to convert the Sun .au format to a .wma format using the
> free Windows Media Encoder. It also is easy to convert the .au to a
> Real .rm sound file. These are the two formats most often used to
> stream audio on the web today. You have to write a .ram redirector file
> to connect to the .rm for streaming, and you write a .wax redirector
> file to connect to the .wma to make it stream. Please see
> http://www.cwdjr.info/PlumsMarch/ . Here you will find the sound and
> redirector files that I mentioned as well as text versions of the
> redirector files. Notice that if you click on the .wax redirector file
> you bring up the big WMP player, and streaming starts. If you click on
> the .ram redirector file, this brings up the Real player and streaming
> starts. You can also embed the players on a page in many different
> ways. Click on the WMP embed link to see one way this can be done. The
> mime file on the page is an include and does nothing by itself - it
> must link to a web page to work.
>
> If you try to click it on, you will either get no display or you will
> get an XML error message from browsers that can handle the mime type
> application/xhtml+xml. I am using a php include to serve the page as
> true xhtml 1.1 when the browser will accept the mentioned mime type and
> as html 4.01 strict when the mime type is not supported, such as for
> IE6.
>
> You are welcome to copy any of the files in this directory if you think
> they might be of use. I will take this directory down in a few days,
> because I do not host streaming media files for others, since they can
> use up quite a bit of bandwidth.

I've saved some of the files, please have them removed as needed. On
the other hand, I need more time to learn the skills.

Thanks for help.
Dung Ping

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