The single most important feature on a Musician’s website is being able to play music to strut your stuff!

In this section we are going to look at various ways of doing this - from the simple to the not-so-simple.

Unless you want to give away your music, you need to edit each song file to about a minute or so. This should be a section that is representative of the song but leaves the listener gasping for more.

The generally accepted format for music files on websites is MP3. This is a compressed file format and the sample rate can be varied from very acceptable to downright bad.

A good middle of the road MP3 file will have the following settings:

Bit Rate Mode: Constant

Quality [Sample Rate]: 128 KBPS

Channel Mode: Stereo

If you need to cut the file size, reducing the sample rate from 128 to 64 KBPS will half the size if the resulting file.

You need to try it out to see what’s acceptable to you.

Unless you own the copyrights on a musical composition, you will have obtain and pay for two separate licenses to play it on your website.

These are explained here -  http://www.iwebformusicians.com/DistributeandPromote/CopyrightPublishing.html

The institutions who protect and manage these copyrights have big bucks to sue offenders.

You have been warned!

The iWeb for Musicians Tutorial EBook is now available.

Click the icon to find out more.

Navigate This Section:

Music Players

QuickTime

MP3 iFrame

Flash

Flash Players

MP3 to Flash

XSPF Player

Code

Custom Player

Flashskins Player

Juke It Jukebox

Jukebox Alive

Continuous Background Music

A lot of people seem to be interested in the idea of having music playing continuously in the background while visitors surf their site. This is not recommended for a music website and can be extremely irritating on any site.

If you decide to have this feature, make sure you keep the initial volume low in the settings, where possible, so that your visitors don’t get blasted off your site.

The simplest way to achieve this is to have a landing page where the music file is set to autostart and is long enough to play for a reasonable length of time or set to loop. Remember that a large file loaded as QuickTime will slow the page download and that a flash player with a compilation track or a playlist player set to continuous play will give better performance. Viewers will then click an “Enter Site” or some such hyperlink to go to the rest of the site via the home page and the navigation menu. This hyperlink is set to open a new window so that the rest of the website can be viewed with the landing page running in the background.

The player can be hidden behind an object if required and the viewer still has the option to close the landing page if your choice of music is driving them insane!