| If you heard Scotty's Powerl .WAV
through the sound card; The sound card works, and your browser is
already configured to play WAV files. It is not a Win3.1,
Win95/98, or sound card installation problem.
Continue down to your browser's midi configuration instructions. Note, this page does not address any issues above browser Versions 4 or above Win 98. |
If you have a player above and No sound, the volume may be turned off, or too loud. If you have a broken piece of a puzzle above, and no sound, your computer is not configured to play .WAV files. One possibility, it be screwed by installing Real Player G2. See note immediately below. |
| Real Media G2 player installation intentionally messes up your
Windows 95/98 playing of WAV files. All is not lost, you can still
follow the instructions for your browser to fix your MIDI playing problem.
Its nearly impossible to fix .WAV, a computer expert can compare
a good computer without the G2 player and use its good registry, as an
*example* to hack the registry of the bad computer.
Note that .Wav can also be played through PC speaker, which alone, cannot play midi files. Buy a good sound card, such as "Sound Blaster". |
What is a MIME? |
|
When they wanted to be send media stuff besides text over the internet, they came up with a way of categorizing what to do with each file by its file extension. So, MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) are standardized file name extensions. |
|
| Browsers
are not automatically configured to play "MIDI" or .mid. |
Version 3 browsers do not automatically
play midi files because they are not configured to know what to do with
the MIME type "midi". Below are instructions for configuring
each browser yourself. Call this MIME type "audio/midi",
designate that the extension .MID is opened with the correct browser "plug-in"
or Windows media player.
The method of configuration is basically the same for all systems and browsers. In the "drill downs" below, you will find the box(es) to click/check HTML syntax may affect a browser too. |
||
| Midi Test
Goodvib.mid |
Click here to test "Goodvib.mid",
a .MID song in a reusable floating player. If necessary, choose
"open". On Win 95/98, The player becomes accessible from the task bar.
On Win 3.1 it is behind your screen near the top left.
NO "Helper Application" is needed to play .MID files on any modern browser. Ignore the sometimes unavoidable message to download any "player" Other than possibly Microsoft for early IExplorer. |
||
| Mosaic
& Early "2" browser users drill down to find something similar |
First Hint, You NEVER need
to get or install Crescendo, or a Real Media player, or any unusual "Helper"
application that you do not know about. Modern browsers are equipped
to play midi files, even streaming x-media, and, with IE5, MP3 files
too. Remove Crescendo through "add/remove programs" in the
Win95/98 Control panel.
Crescendo and the "Real Player" will NEVER work with several different
browsers simultaneously. Adding the wrong "helper" version
to Windows 95/98, will mess up your system FOREVER. There is a great
conspiracy to cover up the fact that many of these helper applications
fail and cause crashes too.
If you get music that is terribly "sour" sounding, You may have 2 (two) different players configured as helper applications to play the mime type midi (music). Uninstall, or get rid of the one that does not belong, then, follow the configuration instructions for your browser below. |
||
| IE3 | .
If the "transporter" sent you to the top of the page, you probably have IE2 or IE3, which does not use/read java script. If you did *not* hear Scotty's WAV report on the way in,
(you can try it here). If the WAV does not
play, it may be that several MIME types are not configured properly.
By following the instructions for "midi", you may learn enough to configure
the other MIME types too. In IE 3 and 4, the IExplor.EXEcute
program plays MIDI music through the Windows operating system and its "media
player", IE 4 &5 usually installs and configures itself
properly to play midi.
If you *did* hear Scotty's report, continue (next), to check for a MIDI MIME type configuration problem. |
||
| IE3
MIME type configuration |
In Microsoft Internet Explorer 3; Choose "View";
Choose "Options"; under the "General" tab; Be sure X is in the box to "Play sounds". Make it so, and click OK. [Reload Web Page] If this does not configure the midi MIME type (.mid) to play, in Explorer click "Help"; click "Help Topics"; click "Configuring File Types" Read and follow instructions (duplicated below). Here are specific instructions for ".mid".
|
||
| Netscape2 | Netscape 2 is probably similar to Netscape 3, if not, please let me know. | ||
| Netscape3
Mime Configuration |
Netscape3... If you did not
hear Scotty's WAV file on the way in, go to top otherwise,
continue.
Note: Navigator uses "plugins" and looks in the "plugins" folder for DLLs starting with "np". It ignores any DLLs which do not start with "np". Also look below for "Conflicts with other plugins". First, be sure Netscape's npaudio.dll is in the plugins
directory, below the Netscape directory..
If you *did* hear Scotty's .wav on the way in, and the above plugin does not show the "audio/midi" suffix as being .mid and enabled; here is what I might do to set up the configuration to play .mid. In Netscape 3 Choose "Options"
Under "File type" look for "audio/midi" with an Action of
|
||
| Communicator4 | .
In Netscape Communicator 4 and 6 and using WinMedia7 If you did *not* hear Scotty's wave file on the way in, go to top. If using Netscape with WinMedia player 7, double click the embed box. Netscape will not play "background" midis, which are not displayed. IE3 would play background . Otherwise, check and set the mime type configuration for .mid files in Communicator 4 , Under "Edit" Choose "Preferences", Under "Navigator" choose "Applications, Scroll down the "Description" list until you find any of the following. audio/music, audio/midi, music/midi, midi, audio/player, music/player, audio/x-midi, and check the "Npaudio file(s)" to see that any or all of these have a ".mid" extension and bring up "Npaudio.dll" click "edit" to check which program or plug-in handles the .MID file extension. As you can see, the description can be most anything, but the main objective is that you open .MID files with Npaudio.dll. If there is none, Click "New Type" and make it so [number one]. Test the Goodvib.mid listed near the top. When leaving this page, click "Go" to choose a page. |
||
| .
IE4 & 5 |
.
If you did *not* hear Scotty's wave file on the way in, go to top. IE4 & 5 try to set up the midi MIME type configurations correctly for you. Here is where to check and set these options. Under "View" ,choose "Internet Options", choose the "Advanced" tab. Scroll down to "Multimedia" and be sure the "play sounds" box is checked. If that is true, and it still does not play, then the volume may be turned off, or a file association dysfunction with Windows 95 itself, as described below. |
||
| Win95/98 | Volume may be turned off, or set too loud. To fix/check
click, Start | Control Pannel | Multimedia | CD music | adjust slider.
(may affect all DL sound).
If you have a sound card, try playing a midi file by double clicking on a .mid file in the C:\winows\media directory. IF Windows 95/98 does *not* play midis by itself (without the browser). Check the MIDI file association setup in the following [drill down]. Start button, Settings, Control Panel Multimedia (double click) midi tab (possibly you just added your new insterment/sound card) or under the Advanced tab be sure it includes [MCI] media Player.DLL and a MIDI Sequencer Device. If all else fails, Windows 95 can be installed over itself if
these
Run REGEDIT
Check or Add the following values
Exit, power off and restart the computer. |
||
| Win3.1 | It didn't seem simple at the time, but oh how easy
it was to tweak the Win.ini or the System.ini compared to the "Registry".
But we don't even have to do that to get Windows3.1 to play midis.
In File manager, just choose a media file ending in .mid. Under File, choose Associate. Scroll down the box and choose "Media Clip" (mplayer.exe). Its a done deal for Win3.1 |
||
| Sound
Card Setup |
Well, there were the "good ole days" of DOS when we were eternally moving jumpers when installing new peripheral cards. In this case, All sound cards want to be "Sound Blaster Compatible" and use IRQ 5, Upper Memory address 220. The card itself may additionally use another IRQ, such as anything like 7 or 9. Usually these kind of conflicts cause lock-ups rather than not playing music. Here is a boot menu for impossible to solve conflicts between your old 486 sound card and a hand scanner, for instance. Study the sound card documentation to help resolve these installation type problems. | ||
| Syntax
HTML MIDI |
If just a few files won't play, it may be because
web servers are case sensitive. If the capitalization in the
HTML does not match the capitalization of the file name, the
server cannot deliver the picture or midi over the web. HTML cannot
serve the file if it is listed as a "//file/anyname.mid", because
that is a reference to a file on the drive of the webmaker's home computer.
Without going into detail about old problems with Server MIME type configurations or older HTML tags, I'll cut straight to what works. For an invisible midi player in Web TV and IE 2,3&4, a tag which says <bgsound scr="Anyname.mid" loop="0"> In the Header. That means before the </HEAD> tag. This tag should be fazed out because it causes a conflict with IE 5 , which in addition to "playing sound", will start a duplicate small player in Netscape's embed space (bleow). The two playing at the same time can cause sour unstoppable music. To correct the above, one can use what I call a "floating" player, just
have IE or Netscape call up a .mid file with a "HREF" link, it will
come up on top of the present page. Example:
Here is the Syntax for any sized embedded player in the pages viewed by Netscape, and IE 4 & 5. Netscape brings up its "npautio.dll" plugin. <EMBED scr="Anyname.mid" align="baseline" width="146"
height="55" autostart="true /or/ false">
|
||
| Conclusion | Both IE 4 & 5, and Netscape4+ set themselves up properly
to play midi, and handle streaming audio and video too. For
streaming midi, it is called audio/x-midi. There are many other streaming
x-files. It is usually better to try to make your native browser
play music or audio/video before downloading something even more complicated,
like crappy "Crescendo" or an unneeded Real player.
Now, please close all the little player boxes before you leave this page. |
||
| If you need personal help or have information to add, Please email me. Doug Merriman<dmerriman@mindspring.com> |