Audio on the Internet

One of the great things about the internet is the wealth of multimedia material available. In this class, we will examine a couple of the (primarily audio) offerings available.

The first tool we will examine is the "RealPlayer", freely available from the RealNetworks WWW site. Note that there are two different versions of the RealPlayer available. One is a completely free version, while the second is "RealPlayer Plus" which provides a few extras at a cost to the purchaser. For this class, we will use the free version - it will be adequate for our needs. The trick is that their WWW site is set up so that it is easier to find the download page for the "Plus" version than it is for the free version.

First Assignment: If you do not already have the RealPlayer program on your computer, download and install it now. Hint: From the RealNetworks page, click on the link for the "Free RealPlayer G2", located on the right hand side, as opposed to the much larger link for "RealPlayer Plus G2" on the left hand side. (You are welcome to purchase the Plus version later if you like.) On the next page you once again have the option of choosing the basic or plus version. Choose the basic version. Fill out the form and perform the download.

Once the player has been downloaded, install it on your system, and try out some of the preset stations. (Enjoy!)

Hint: To install the RealPlayer, you should use Windows Explorer to find the file that you downloaded and double-click on the name of that file, or you could use "Start-Find-Files or Folders" to search for the name of the file you downloaded (search for the file named "r32*" (the '*' is a wildcard)) and then double-click on the name of the file that is found. From this point, just follow the installation instructions that appear on your screen.

Now that you have the RealPlayer installed, you can listen to both prerecorded programs as well as live radio broadcasts. See what you can find! As we found in class, by using AltaVista to search for "+realplayer +radio +live", one very good site is Dick Becker's LIVE Internet Radio Stations. (Lots of interesting stations here!)

Assignment: Now that you have the RealPlayer installed, you can help to pick the new state song for the state of Virginia. Go to the Virginia State Song Competion page, listen to the songs, and provide feedback. Be sure to listen to the one by Debi Smith (One of my favorite performers!) I am sure that she would appreciate any favorable comments you might want to provide for her song, "Virginia".

Speaking of Debi, you can find more of her music at the Debi Smith Home Page. There are lots of other great performers, besides Debi, available at songs.com.

Next we will examine some of the latest software for playing music on your computer. The newest thing is something called MP3; which greatly reduces the amount of space needed to store sound. With MP3 compression, a single CD which would normally hold about a dozen songs can now hold more than 100. There are MP3 players and soundfiles available for download over the internet.

Assignment: Download and install the Sonique MP3 player from the internet. Try searching for it on your own to see if you can find it. I will post the URL here in the future if you have any problems. Hint: There is a site dedicated entirely to the Sonique program. You can also use Sonique to play CD's from the CDROM drive on your computer.

Assignment: Visit the MP3 WWW Site and download one or more MP3 files. Use Sonique to play these files on your computer.

There are many more audio and video tools on the internet. These two should give you a good introduction to how to find and install multimedia tools. You can find links to lots of other MP3 sites at Top MP3 Sites.

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