DSMI Music & Plug-ins for OS/2

— I no longer develop this legacy resource —

MOD Music | Coding for MOD | Real-Time MIDI | Music Pages

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MOD Music on the Web

Note: Most of the support for the MOD Plug-in have dried up, so I've removed the coding that played the music. This page is left primarily for legacy interest.

Use Music Sparingly on Websites

You will want to be careful about where you place music on your site, and give your viewers an option to turn it off. Not only does the background music add bandwidth, but it can be distracting or unwelcome in certain environments (offices). Music makes sense on some sites, but not on most.

The ability of the page viewer to hear it depends upon the operating system, the browser and the plug-ins installed on that browser. Of course, there must be a sound card and the speakers must be on with the volume up sufficiently to hear it.

Don't be annoying with the use of music or by turning up the intensity so that it will be loud even if the volume is low, like the Sears Super Saturday TV ads that have you scrambling for the remote to turn it off.

OS/2 MOD Plug-in

One of the first plug-ins for the Netscape Navigator for OS/2 was for MODular music. If you have the right plug-in for your Web browser you should be able to hear music on this page once it is loaded. If you are running OS/2 Warp you can get more information on the Digital Sound & Music Interface (DSMI) for OS/2 Plug-in for Netscape Navigator.

If you have the right plug-in for your Web browser you should be able to hear music on this page once it is loaded.

Windows and Mac MOD Plug-ins

The MOD-Plug Tracker Plug-in for Windows 9x has been phased out, although a MODPlug Player and Tracker are still available. It is unlikely that you will be able to install it into modern browsers. The PlayerPRO Netscape Plug-in for Macintosh is no longer available.

Coding for MOD on Your Web Pages

The code I used to have on this page incorporated the OS/2 DSMI plug-in for OS/2. I used the following sequence to place the call for the DSMI plug-in on my pages:

<EMBED> is the opening tag and </EMBED> is the closing tag.
Use the HIDDEN="true" attribute to hide the sequence on your page.
The TYPE"audio/x-amf" attribute identifies the piece type of audio player the browser plug-in should expect.
SRC="example.amf" specifies the particular music that is to be played.
Example.amf is the piece that came with the OS/2 DSMI plug-in.
The suffix .amf identifies the format of the music (and the type of player needed to hear the music).

I then placed the necessary code so that Windows users can hear the MOD music. The MODPlug Tracker Plugin had a page devoted to this coding, but it is no longer available. Since it is unlikely that you would find sufficient numbers of people capable of listening to the MOD Plug-in content to justify the efforts to place the code on your site, this content doesn't really matter.

Larger pieces of music sound better, but require longer download times and not all plug-ins will play all the formats (AMF, IT, MOD, MTM, S3M, XM) that are available on the Net.

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Real-Time MIDI

The OS/2 Real-Time MIDI Subsystem by Timur Tabi (now hosted by Finnegan Software).

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Other Music Pages

Music Collection for OS/2 is sorted by category (MIDI, MOD, MPEG, etc.).

Early Web Music

This page was built in an era when several people were working to get plugins to work with browsers to play music on websites.

There were legal repositories of music you could use. Given the poor bandwidth (most of us were on dial-up) it wasn't the wisest choice.

There are legal ramifications to providing music on your site even using today's technology.

OS/2 Resources Pages

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