Best Way To Add Music Clips To Website?

Factual Questions
1

I am doing a website for a guy who wants to add 12 music clips…I have converted them to three different formats: .wav .mp3 .flv
I figured mp3 would have been best, but it is taking way too long to download, even though I have put them on three different pages.
I think Flash might be faster, but am having problems with the damned autoplay (even though I have turned it off everywhere on the site) and once I got that sort of fixed, I get these hugeass navigation buttons that don’t seem to want to appear in a smaller screen.
The .wav files seem to be rather large and I am afraid will take even longer to download on people’s computers. The music clips are each about 90 seconds or longer.
I got his video clip to work just fine by putting in a Flash format and it takes less time than all the other methods of music clips.

So I guess my main question is, what is the best method to add (non-video) music clips to a website - for speed, universal compatibility and quality?

2

In my experience .wma is actually the best. That’s if your using freewebs. Which host are you using?

3

Thanks for the tip!
The .wma format seems to be working just fine in IE, although in Firefox the damn things start playing without even clicking play, but I should be able to figure out that glitch.

Do you happen to know if I need to add extra links for Mac computers or will .wma work on most Mac’s as well?

4

I’d stay away from anything Windows for web stuff, since people on Macs and Linux will have to use it. I think your best bet is a highly compressed MP3 with a low bit rate, embedded via a Flash player. I think that’d give you the most control over how the music sounds and the highest amount of people able to hear it without being bugged for annoying plugins (although, yes, Flash is a plugin).

Make sure autoplay is not turned on. That’s annoying.

5

MP3 is definitely the way to go. WMA restricts it to Windows computers, and while MP3 doesn’t compress as well for the audio quality, it’s universal so everyone should be able to listen to it. And definitely make sure it doesn’t autoplay. There’s not much that I hate more than going to a website only to be confronted with a sudden blast of audio. (This is why I hate MySpace so much.)

There’s should be a number of free embedded players for Java and Flash out there, and either will work.