Music Tutorial

LiveAudio

LiveAudio is the default midi player for Netscape Navigator.

This is the control console for LiveAudio.

Information on LiveAudio can be found here.

Crescendo

Crescendo is a freeware midi plug-in for NN and MSIE. It is supported for the following:

• NN - Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT and MacOS.
• MSIE - Windows 95 and Windows NT.

There is also a shareware version called Crescendo Plus that offers additional features.

This is the control console for Crescendo for versions less than 2.3.

This is the control console for Crescendo for versions 2.3 and greater.

The console has changed considerably for Crescendo versions 3 and 4. I don't yet have an image of the new console. It's a bit smaller and much nicer looking.

The console has changed again for the beta Crescendo 5 version. Crescendo 5 supports mp3 files as well as midi files.

Information on Crescendo can be found here.

MidPlug

MidPlug is a freeware midi plug-in for NN and MSIE from Yamaha. Like Crescendo, it is a streaming player.

MidPlug uses a software synthesizer instead of using your sound card like other midi players do. The advantage to MidPlug is sound quality. It completely blows LiveAudio and Crescendo away, there's absolutely no comparison. A disadvantage to MidPlug is that it uses a lot of CPU power. On my Pentium 150, the music sometimes loses tempo or even stops completely when I do other things on the computer.

Actually, I've found that the reason MidPlug sounds so much better to me is that is uses the Yamaha synthesizer program. This program is installed separately from MidPlug. The latest version of Crescendo can use the Yamaha synthesizer program, so you can get the same sound using Crescendo.

The Yamaha synthesizer only uses your sound card as an amplifier, and uses your CPU for all of the actual music synthesizing. It sounds much better on my system, but I have a very low-end sound card. If you have a better sound card than mine, you might not hear much difference - or could even find that your sound card produces better sound.

These are the five available control consoles for MidPlug.

Information on MidPlug can be found here.

Internet Explorer 4

I don't know much about the default midi player that IE 4 uses. The console for it is a very plain looking one with no volume control (the slider shows the progress of the song and can be used to skip forward or backward):

Other Plugins

There are a number of other plug-ins available. I haven't tried them, nor have I talked with anyone that has.

The following plug-ins (among others) are available at Dave Central: Audio Plugins

Beatnik
Delta Beta
I-CONtrol WEBTunes 1.0

No Plugins

When you try to play a MIDI file when you don't have any MIDI plugins active, NN displays an alert that indicates that mplayer.exe is going to download a file. It doesn't play the MIDI file, but it lets you download it.