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How to place background music in a webpage:

1. Grab a sound file!

Before you can add music to a webpage, you first need a song or sound file that you want to use to play on the page. You can get this file from your own personal music collection on your computer, a sound file you've made, etc.

IMPORTANT: Your sound file must either be a WAV, AU, MP3 or MIDI for it to work as background music!

NOTE: If you are going to place music on a commercial site, make sure that your sound file is not copyrighted material as this will make you liable for legal action. To be safe, only use music if you have the permission of the artist that made it or if you created it yourself.

2. Upload Your Music file with an FTP program

Once you've found the music file perfect for your webpage, it's time to put it on your web server with an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program. If you don't happen to have an FTP program, there are several programs online that you can download for free:

MAC & PC:
FileZilla - http://filezilla-project.org/

P C Only:
SmartFTP - http://www.smartftp.com/
Coffee cup - http://www.coffeecup.com/free- ftp/

MAC Only:
Fetch - http://fetchsoftworks.com/
Cybe rduck - http://cyberduck.ch/

Once you've setup your FTP software and entered the appropriate information for your web server, you will need to add the music file onto your web server. Once it is added, make sure you know its URL on the server because you need that info for the next steps.

3. Add the background music HTML code

Now that you have the file on your web server, you're ready to edit the webpage that you want to have the music play on. To edit the file, open it in a text editor such as Notepad for PC or TextEdit for MAC. Now, insert this HTML code into your webpage document:

< bgsound src="music.url" loop="x" >

music.url will need to be changed to the appropriate URL of the file saved on your web server mentioned in the previous step.

loop="x" is the number of time you want the sound to loop itself. Change the letter "x" to the number or you can replace the letter "x" with "infinite" to play the sound forever.

4. Suggestions & Tips:

Adding background music this way will only work in the Internet Explorer broswer.

Make sure you use a music file that doesn't sound annoying or is a large file as this may irritate people who visit your webpage.

You should be all set and ready to add cool music to all your webpages. Enjoy!

Learn more about this author, Alex Landis.
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