Sound Files

Sound File Formats

Sound File Formats | Creating Sound Files | Audio Players | Format Conversion | Adding Sound to Web Pages | Going Further

Like images, sound files also come in a variety of formats, not all of which can be used on every platform. AIFF is a native audio format for the Macintosh; WAV is native for Windows. Both platforms also can play and save sounds in AU, SND, and MPEG audio formats. Both also use the MIDI format, but only for music.

AU (also often referred to as u-law, after its most widely used sound sampling scheme) is a Sun Microsystems format that is popular in the Unix world and has the advantage of being available on a wide variety of systems. So if you choose to link to AU files in your Web pages, people visiting your pages from PCs, Macs, and Unix machines should all be able to hear the sounds. On the other hand, AU files have comparatively rather poor sound quality.

If you are only concerned with other Windows users hearing your audio files, you can treat them to much higher quality sound with the WAV format.

MIDI is a very efficient format for many kinds of music and certain kinds of sounds. However, it is less well supported on the Web than the other formats and doesn't work well for things like voice (unless you want to sound like a computer).