How to Embed Background Music on Your Web Site

Update: This article was written at a time when Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 4 were the browsers used by the majority of people. ("What is Netscape?" you say. My point precisely.) As such, the rest of this page is obsolete. It even talks about a type of music file (midi) that you rarely see on the Internet any more. If your site uses HTML5, you should use the <audio> tag instead. You can find more information about the use of this tag in the audio section of the official web standards site.

The problem with embedding background music is that the different browsers out there have their own methods of implementing embedded music files.
For all versions of Netscape, as well as Internet Explorer ("IE") 3.0 and above, you can use the following code:

<embed src="yourmusicfile.mid" autostart="true" loop="true"
width="2" height="0">
</embed>

The width and height attribute given above causes the player to be invisible. If you do not want it to be invisible, you can specify your own dimensions to suit your site decor.
For Opera and all IE versions, the following code works:

<bgsound src="yourmusicfile.mid" loop="infinite">

As you probably have noticed, IE 3.0 and above support both methods, so you cannot simply put both those tags into your web document in the hope of supporting all browsers. It will work on Netscape and early versions of IE, but the newer versions of IE will recognize both tags, leading to problems when IE tries to load the music file twice.
The workaround that I've seen on some sites, that seems to work for me, is to enclose the BGSOUND tag inside NOEMBED tags, thus preventing IE from interpreting the second tag.

<embed src="yourmusicfile.mid" autostart="true" loop="true"
width="2" height="0">
</embed>
<noembed>
<bgsound src="yourmusicfile.mid" loop="infinite">
</noembed>

This code appears to be compatible with all versions of IE, Netscape and Opera.