Review: Adding Sound to Your Website

I need to start out this tutorial review by saying I’m not a big fan sound on web pages. In fact, I hate it when I’m innocently surfing along, click on what might be an interesting link and am assaulted by some crummy keyboard generated auto-playing MIDI cover for “Another One Bites the Dust”. You know what I’m talking about, we’ve all been there. Oh and if your site is guilty of this egregious violation to my ears, STOP IT!

Okay, deep breath............

As averse as I am to the above, on-click type sounds on web pages are okay in my opinion as long as they serve a purpose and are used judiciously. I’m not about to define what judicious is but will say that “I know it when I see it”. With that in mind I decided to try adding some sound to one of my websites and it just so happens that Vince (aka wizeman of V2C Studios and rwReview.com) kindly posted an excellent screen cast tutorial of how to do just that using JavaScript snippets that he wrote and SoundManager from schillmania.com.

Vince begins his tutorial by recommending anyone not familiar with JavaScript (me) go to w3school to learn the basics by working through one of their tutorials, but he also states that if you follow his instructions closely you should be able to complete his SoundManager tutorial. That’s what I did and I completed the tutorial with everything working as it should. I am going to check out the w3school JavaScript tutorial when I get a little extra time (says this as if it will ever happen).

The only real problem I encountered was mostly my fault but I’m also going to blame RapidWeaver as well. I’m not going to go into the gory details but if you’re interested in reading about my publishing problems, check out this forum thread. Sufice it to say I wasn’t thinking when I decided to work through the tutorial and I just applied it to the site file that opened when I launched RapidWeaver. This was an as yet unpublished site and was quite large. Like I said I’m not going into details.

The tutorial was very easy to follow and Vince has a pleasant voice and an easy-on-the-ears speaking style. Vince clearly lays out the steps involved and I was able to understand what was going on with very little effort. I have a site in mind that I think I’ll be able to incorporate some sound so this was a fun and useful tutorial indeed. Check out Vince’s SoundManager tutorial and many more at his rwReview.com website.

Thanks Vince!