Overview

At this point, you should be fairly adept at putting QuickTime movies on a Web page. Now let's take a closer look at some of the media you can create and deliver using QuickTime. First let's look at audio: what you can do with it, how to create it, how to compress it, and how to get the most out of it.

Interesting Ways to Use Audio

Audio is one of the most overlooked ways to enhance a website. You can use QuickTime audio to make your Web page talk, sing, explode, or play music, while letting users control the volume or stop the sound at will.

QuickTime includes codecs that let you provide extremely high-quality sound on a CD (or for download), or extremely low-bandwidth audio that plays in real time over typical dialup connections.

In some cases you can have your cake and eat it too: MIDI music, speech compressed with the Qualcomm PureVoice codec, and music compressed with the QDesign Music Codec all deliver good-quality sound that plays in real time over typical connections.

Here are some of the interesting things you can do with QuickTime audio; we'll examine each one in detail:

• audio greetings

• background music

• ambient sounds

• stories and speech

Where it's appropriate, we'll recommend using a particular codec, sampling rate, or sample size.