Making audio HTML5-ready
The first thing we need to do, before we can put them on our website, is make our audio files HTML-5 ready.
Before sifting through various audio formats to figure out which one goes with which browser, let me provide a very basic overview of audio compression.
Audio compression
You probably are familiar with at least some of the popular audio formats such as MP3, WAV, AIFF, and so on.
Raw, uncompressed audio files, in the WAV (for Windows) and AIFF (for Macs) formats, provide the highest available online audio sound quality. However, these files are very large, and download too slowly for most users. MP3 audio files, on the other hand, are substantially smaller in file size. A compression algorithm is used to squeeze extra data out of files as they are converted to MP3. Moreover, for most listeners, and most audio files, MP3 quality is sufficient. Thus, when we talk about making audio files available online, we are often talking about compressed audio files in formats...