Skip to Content »

FlashApe » Background sounds in flash sites: way passe or ok?

Background sounds in flash sites: way passe or ok?

  • February 20th, 2006
  • 6:41 pm

A couple of years ago we (as in, general consensus among the studio) made a decision to either stop or seriously reduce the amount of background audio in the site…loops, music tracks, etc. We just found it to be prety annoying when audio would autoplay on sites, when we were browsing around the web listening to itunes with our headphones on, and felt most people felt the same way.

I bring this up because was just surfing around in bed on the powerbook, and hit a site where the music just started blaring. The wife was sleeping next to me, luckily I got it quickly before I woke her up (we don’t want to go there…), but it made me think oher situations where I wouldn’t want music popping up.

Sometimes I guess it’s appropriate…a band’s website for instance. But then you run into situations like my space which has those damn mp3 players that autoplay people’s horrific selections. I feel like that kind of stuff should be user-initiated action…if i want the music or video to start playing, i’ll click on a button somewhere. What do you think?

7 People had this to say...

Gravatar
  • Antony
  • February 20th, 2006
  • 7:58 pm

Way passe.

And, even when it is appropriate to have music, sounds, etc, a volume slider or a mute option is essential.

Otherwise people generalise all flash stuff as being ‘evil’ and start using flash killing plugins, and stuffing things up for all of us.

Gravatar

Yup. Same conclusion you reached was through personal experience. It is the same conclusion any user will reach. You need to give users control, and autoplay = true is the spawn of satan, a kitten dies everytime a website plays un-asked for music, etc. It’s pretty easy; type 5 letters “false”. Simple. User controlled. Positive.

Gravatar
  • Derek P.
  • February 20th, 2006
  • 10:50 pm

I agree, those sorts of things (although there are some exceptions) should be completely user initiated. Ray Camden made a blog post about the Quicktime player stating that even though his settings say to not allow auto-playing videos, by specifying a param to auto-play, the code would ignore the users request. Thats bad.

Gravatar
  • McVirusS
  • February 21st, 2006
  • 12:15 am

It really depends on the kind of site it’s used on. I wouldn’t use background music on a corporate site. I make a lot of online Flash games and I think that’s a good example of a site that should/could have background music. Of course is a mute button and/or volume slider a must. IMHO are sites with a high entertainment value (like game sites, band sites etc.) allowed to use background music ;). Just NEVER EVER forget the mute button.

Maybe you should mute your sound next time you are browsing the web in your bed ;).

Gravatar
  • Nikita
  • February 21st, 2006
  • 1:53 am

Yes. I don’t like to use background music too. Not necessary in most cases.

Gravatar
  • freddy
  • February 21st, 2006
  • 8:33 am

Well, if you are traying to expose more people to new and unknown music, I say go for autoplay w/option to pause, how many people you think will press the play button just based on your written advice? I have found really great music this way(also a lot of crap, but that happens with everything, not just music), also consider, what if the message you are trying to convey needs music to enhance the experience?

Of course, if the music has nothing to do with the site and the user isn’t aware that it may find it, you better avoid it at all.

But myspace… come on, music is the main reason for myspace to exist! :)

Gravatar
  • ad
  • March 10th, 2006
  • 2:57 am

Don’t add sound that autoplays. It’s plain rude - and a bad user experience. It makes users close your pages without reading the content. It’s almost as rude as resizing the browser window to a little square when the page loads.

Many users (myself included) open sites in browser tabs in the background while we continue reading the article/ feed we are on. You can imagine how annoying it is when one or more tabs out of the 20 or 30 you have open in the background start playing background warble - you have to go through each tab - identify potential flash, search for mute button, or close that page, and if it’s not the right one carry on… Either way, I probably won’t see your great Flash game/animation/ria because the sound prevoked me to me close your page.

Want your say?

* Required fields. Your e-mail address will not be published on this site


You can use the following XHTML tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>