[Freddy]

I've been looking for ways to add sounds to a web project I am currently toying with, but you would be surprised maybe by just how poor basic sound support is for web pages.  If you want to play a simple sound it is not always so easy if you want to work to current standards.  Mostly I imagine people will use some plugin like QuickTime, RealPlayer etc etc, but why go to so much bother for a simple beep...

I found this solution which seems pretty compact and uses a custom Flash object and javascript to offer a solution to this problem.  I am no expert on sounds on the web, but to me it looks pretty good.

It's called Sound Manager 2 and is available with a BSD licence, which means it is pretty much free to use how you want.

Link : Sound Manager 2

I'm thinking this could probably be used to add audio content to chatbots etc, but also just thought it might interest a few folk here.

[Data]

Looks interesting to me, it’s always been a bit tricky to put sound on sites, I have experimented with it over the years, one of the problems I always came across was browser compatibility, Hopefully the new HTML 5 is going to get rid of that problem for ever.

I need to look into it more but one of the main advantaged with HTML 5 is its ability to play video and sound directly in the browser, no plugin required.

Time will tell.

The web is moving on… 

Nice find Freddy   

[DaveMorton]

My pChat project has used SoundManager2 for a while now, for the Buzz command, and it works very well. My only gripe with it is that the sound file's format has to be in MP3 format, and the sound file I wanted to use was in WAV format. I had to find a reliable, quality converter to change my WAV file to MP3, but once that was done, it worked brilliantly.

[Joseph]

I've used Soundmanager2 and really liked it very much due to how you could style the player elements using CSS. I liked the look of the page player example they have, its very minimalistic controls and you don't have to use any graphics.