Some of the most popular sound file formats for the Macintosh are AU, AIFF, and MPEG audio. AU (also often referred to as u-law, after its most widely used sound sampling scheme) has the advantage of being available on a wide variety of systems. So if you choose to link to AU files in your Web pages, people viewing your pages from PCs, Macs, and Unix machines should all be able to hear the sounds. On the other hand, AU files have rather poor sound quality.

If you are only concerned with other Mac users hearing your audio files, you can treat them to much higher quality sound with the AIFF format.

MPEG audio can also be of very good quality, at least according to the technical specifications. But at present there are fewer tools for playing sounds recorded in this format.

Generally browsers do not have sound playing capabilities built-in, but can be easily configured to use other programs to play sounds which are sent to the browser. See the section on configuring your system for details of the helpers and plug-ins used to play various sound formats.

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