I used an iPhone to record a piece of piano music as .m4a format. I would like to chop it and convert it into a suitable format to be used as the background music in a php/html website.
I have the following questions:- 1. what kind of format is the best (e.g. mp3, WAV, etc)? 2. shall I chop the .m4a followed by conversion, or shall I convert it to another format then chop? 3. may I just apply the file in the webpage, to produce a looping effect? but I worry about, after each refresh, the music may play from the beginning which is not desired.
Thanks a lot!!
Generally speaking, it's a bad idea to have looping music on your website. 95% of people that visit websites like to have control over media that is playing. Rather than embedding, it may be a good idea to include a javascript plugin which users can use to control the song's volume and seek position. Most plugins allow you to auto-start a song when the page loads, which would allow you to have the same effect as embedding the song (I still recommend against auto-start, but it's your page).
One plugin that I have used with good success in the past is http://www.jplayer.org. It allows both audio and video playback. It also works with .m4a files so you wouldn't have to convert anything.
If you're wanting to have the music continuously play rather than start over everytime the visitor goes to a new page, you will have to look into using an iframe to hold the contents of your site.