Very well. You love the piece, you've found a good file, and you want to share it. I understand. I have students who practice the Bach suites in the hallway before lessons so that whoever's walking by can hear. Here is how to do it so that only the people who want to hear it do.

I don't keep sound files on my own pages, so these are written the way I'd do it if I did. My former student Charlotte Swenson, who sequences Satie very nicely, has kindly let me use her name in the examples. Type the HTML in exactly; the parts in capitals are the tags, and the rest is yours to change.

Upload the MIDI file to your GeoCities.us space along with your pages. Name it in small letters with no spaces. Then make an ordinary link to it, and say what it is, who wrote it, who sequenced it, and how big it is:

On your page that looks like this:

(It isn't a working link here, because there's no file. That's rather the point of my page.)

When a visitor clicks it, the browser opens its own little player, with its own Stop button. In Netscape it's a small panel with play and stop; in Internet Explorer, the Windows Media Player usually comes up. Either way, the visitor chose to hear it and can stop it any time. That's all there is to it. It's the polite way, and it's the way I'd like everyone to use.

Notice the é. That's how you get the accent on Gymnopédie in HTML. Satie would want his accent.

If you'd like a little player sitting right on the page, use EMBED, and set AUTOSTART to false. Then the player appears with its buttons, and nothing happens until your visitor presses Play.

• AUTOSTART="false" is the whole point. If it says true, you're back to the ambush.
• LOOP="false" means it plays once and stops, the way music in a concert hall does.
• WIDTH="144" HEIGHT="60" is the size of Netscape's full player panel. Internet Explorer draws its own player in that space, and it looks a little different, but it works.

Three cautions. Put the player on a music page of its own, not your front page, because the browser has to load the player before it can finish the page, and on some computers that takes a while. Put the plain link and the credits underneath it as well, because a visitor whose browser has no player set up will see only a puzzle piece or an empty box. And never, ever add HIDDEN to an EMBED. A hidden player with no buttons is a radio with the knobs pulled off.

This is the one I'm asking you to take off your page tonight:

BGSOUND only works in Internet Explorer. It starts the moment the page opens, it puts no button on the page to turn it off, and with LOOP="infinite" it starts again from the beginning every time it finishes, for as long as the visitor stays. Netscape ignores it altogether. So half your visitors never hear your music, and the other half spend their visit looking for the volume knob. If you have a BGSOUND tag on your page, this is your sign. Change it to a link.

I'm fairly sure it was a BGSOUND that played the Canon at me on Tuesday night. It certainly gave me no way to stop it.

If you got the file from a MIDI collection on the Web, the collection usually says whose it is. Many sequencers also type their name and a copyright line right into the file, and some players will show you that if you look at the file's properties. Write to the person, tell them which page you'd like to put it on, and wait for a yes. If you can't find out who made it, I'm sorry, but that's your answer: don't use it.