Audio Player

An audio player is a program designed to play sounds downloaded by a World Wide Web browser. Most browsers do not have audio support built in, but nearly all of them can launch an external audio player as a helper program.

URLs:

Netscape's Helper Apps page

This collection of pointers to information about helper applications is a great place to start looking for your own set.

UT's Archive of Macintosh audio players

A comprehensive compendium of all the best Macintosh audio helper applications.

The Virtual Web Library's Audio Software Page

This collection of pointers to Web-related audio software is the best all-around reference on the subject.

W3E References:

helper applications

multimedia

Detail:

Audio players are available as freeware or shareware for most operating systems. Common audio players for PCs include WPLANY and Wham. Macs use audio players such as Frequency Meter, and Sound Machine. The interesting part is the file format (or rather the audio output format) that such helper applications can handle. Because Web page designers can never know for sure what kinds of computers will be accessing their content (including audio) it behooves them to use common, if not standard audio file formats. This means that most audio files you encounter on the Web will have extensions like:

• .WAV - originally the Windows WAVe table format, now a common Web audio format
• .AU - originally the UNIX Audio file format, also commonly used on the Web
• .SBI - originally a Sound Blaster Instrument file format
• .SND - Another popular UNIX audio format, SND is an abbreviation for "SouND file."

The majority of audio helper applications can handle most, of not all, of these formats, so they can usually play back all the sound files passed over to them by the Web browsers they assist.