Mp3 or wav or...

[aussieoak]

What is the best type of sound file to use on a web site?

mp3 , wav , ???

What is .aif?

[liorean]

aiff is the traditional mac sound format, equivalent of au on *nix systems and wav on windows and os/2 systems. It's also the format that CD audio is stored in.

These raw waveform, uncompressed formats are big, but supported. At least wav and au have support on all platform/browser combos that support sounds embedded on homepages. However, they are as mentioned large. You shouln't use them for sounds that are longer than a few seconds at maximum. Mp3, real audio, ogg, windows media are all better choices for longer playing media. They require a plugin or ActiveX control to run, however, and are not always supported by the clients. Real audio and windows media have built in streaming features if you want such. Flash can be used for playing and streaming sound also.

[jeskel]

You would typically use .wav for professionnal use. If you need to send a track recorded on ProTools to someone who will work on your song using Cubase you would save it as .wav (well the ProTools/Cubase subject is a bit more complicated than this but let's make it short). It's quite big as liorean pointed out so you would not make songs available to your users under this format. MP3 definitly seems to become the standard for music download so I would recommend using this since it seems that it is what you wanna make according to another thread you posted.