{{redirect, WP:AUDIO, WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia, Wikipedia:WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia

MIDI MIDI (; Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and ...

Media files on Wikipedia

Some Wikipedia articles include sound or video files, that can be played on almost all personal computers. However, your computer must have the right software. If your computer does not automatically play these files when you click on them, downloading and installing free software from the Internet can enable it to do so. Sound files on Wikipedia generally use the

Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conj ...

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

audio format, and video files use the

VP9 VP9 is an open and royalty-free video coding format developed by Google. VP9 is the successor to VP8 and competes mainly with MPEG's High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265). At first, VP9 was mainly used on Google's video platform YouTube. ...

Theora Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It is developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg contai ...

format, both contained in either

WebM WebM is an audiovisual media file format. It is primarily intended to offer a royalty-free alternative to use in the HTML5 video and the HTML5 audio elements. It has a sister project, WebP, for images. The development of the format is sponsored ...

Ogg Ogg is a free, open container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The authors of the Ogg format state that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high-quality di ...

files. However, Microsoft Windows,

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...

, and older

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

do not support these formats by default, and depend on software to play the files. When you use Wikipedia in a browser this software is integrated by default. Music files may occasionally use the

format (.MID or .MIDI extension). Wikipedia can play a MIDI file by converting it to digital audio, or depending on how the MIDI file is linked it may rely on your computer's browser and hardware to play the MIDI file.

Directions on installing software >>

''For help making and converting video and audio into the format usable on Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Creation and usage of media files.''

Media help