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Comment by ftio | Hacker News Reader

This is insanely cute, and posting WAV audio files on a website in 2000 strikes me as pretty sophisticated! Did you or someone else convert some older audio-playing mechanism to <audio> tags? I don't remember those existing back in 2000.

My two boys both have colds today, so the little-kid congestion in the recordings is extra adorable for me at the moment. Thanks for sharing.

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When I first came across the site in 2017, all the audio files were in embed tags and they all autoplayed at once. It looks like one of my coworkers "fixed" that in 2019.

I played them all simultaneously to see how it'd be and I can confirm it is great

It was quite trivial actually, the problem was that downloading a wav file on dial-up wasn't the best experience so you'd have to make sure to downsample for it to be usable.

If I recall correctly the audio tag RFC first came out in 2000 but I'd be shocked if any major browsers supported it.

You could use EMBED to autoplay WAV and MIDI. IE (in classic Microsoft fashion) also defined BGSOUND for the same.

I remember an email signature from around that time that went "If I wanted your website to make sound, I'd have licked my finger and rubbed it across my monitor."

Since the mid 90s Internet Explorer & Netscape had aiff support and autoplay and Javascript 1.0. We had some good times.

https://auth0.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-javascript/

The earliest browser to support the audio tag that I can find would be Safari 3.1, or the first release of Chrome, in 2008.

(No support in Netscape. Firefox in 2009, IE got it in 2010, Opera in 2011).

Before then, I'd be expecting bgsound on IE, or embed for everyone else, or object and a plugin.

You could do audio with the adobe svg plugin round about 2002-3 I think. I made a pong game with stereo ball noise.

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