Background MIDI Music

images and media 1996 dead

Auto-playing background music, the sound of the 1996 web.

In 2026: Both original tags are dead: <bgsound> was IE-only and <embed> for MIDI needed a plugin nobody ships. Browsers also block autoplay with sound outright now. The working replacement is an <audio> tag the visitor presses play on. Pick a MIDI from the xbawx sound archive at /snd/ and use its preview mp3, which is the one wired up below (Scott Joplin, public domain).

Where it came from: Microsoft Internet Explorer 2 BGSOUND, 1996, alongside Netscape LiveAudio the same year. MDN ↗

<!-- Internet Explorer -->
<bgsound src="music/theme.mid" loop="infinite">

<!-- Netscape (needed the LiveAudio plugin) -->
<embed src="music/theme.mid" autostart="true" loop="true"
       hidden="true" width="2" height="2">

<!-- Both at once, which is what everybody actually shipped -->
<object data="music/theme.mid" type="audio/midi">
  <embed src="music/theme.mid" autostart="true" loop="true" hidden="true">
</object>

<!-- The 2026 version. Autoplay with sound is blocked, so give them a button.
     Every track at https://xbawx.com/snd/ has a rendered mp3 at the same
     hash under /snd/preview/, and the original .mid next to it. -->
<audio id="bgm" loop
  src="https://xbawx.com/snd/preview/70/70db912c2b37cc4682e540b712576f1338089503.mp3">
</audio>
<button onclick="document.getElementById('bgm').play()">Play music</button>
<button onclick="document.getElementById('bgm').pause()">Stop</button>

sandboxed demo · breaks nothing but itselfrestart

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