Sound
Jeff Williamson
Northern Virginia Community College
www.nvcc.edu/ home/nvwillj/ html-sound/
nvwillj@nvcc.edu
I confess; recorded sound is not something I know much about or use often. This is just a page to get folks in my classes started if they just haven't done anything with recorded sound.
Some things to keep in mind:
1. HTML files are tiny; sound files are enormous.
2. TCP/IP, the common language of the Internet, is built on packet-switching, which breaks data into lots of pieces, sends each over the fastest possible route, and re-assembles everything at the destination server. This technology is not friendly to time-sensitive data such as sound and video. All attempts to put sound and video on the net have to work against the nature of TCP/IP. They do this either by
- waiting for 100% of time-sensitive data to download before
playing it (.wav, .au, .qtm, .and .avi do this)
- streaming the data in a way that allows the beginning of it to be played while the rest of it is still downloading (.rm Real Media files do this)
3. Waiting: To put a .wav, .au, .midi, .qtm, or .avi file on your page, just create a hyperlink to the file -
<a href="drumroll.wav">List to a drumroll</a>
Again, this method will not play the sound until all of the sound file has downloaded.
4. Streaming. You'll need a special program to create streaming media. There's a bunch of them; I don't know much about any of them. Real Networks are pretty much the standard now, so I went to their site and behold - they have a freeware Real Media producer at http://www.real.com/ products/tools /producer/index.html? src=toolsmain. (3.2 megs)
The producer has a nice wizard that pretty much sets everything up for you. It does not require anything special on your server, though there are grades of server upgrades (and producer upgrades) available from Real Media.
You can convert media files to Real Media, or record directly into Real Media, or use a microphone to broadcast through the producer directly to your web server. I think this last option requires special server software, for those who need to webcast.
Note: I would imagine that if you need to make short, quality, original recordings, it's probably best to record them in an standard format like .wav first, before converting to Real Media. This would allow you to edit the file with whatever sound software you prefer, in a format that - although I'm not really sure - probably has more information than Real formats.
Clip length would probably make a difference here, though - I wouldn't want to try to edit an hour-long radio broadcast in .wav format.
The Real Producer will also write an HTML page with the relevant information - a nice touch.
Problems: Two items tripped me up on the producer:
1. It only produces media for the RealPlayer G2, the latest Real plug-in. Earlier players - even one version earlier - won't recognize files created with the current RealProducer.
To get backwards compatibility, you have to buy the $150 Real Producer G2 Plus.
2. There's a distinction between loading a document and recording it to Real Audio format. There's a point in the loading process where you click "Finish" - but the file has only finished loading - it has not been recorded into Real Media format yet. You need to click the "Start" recording button in the bottom.
Want to hear my one and only Real Audio file? If (and ONLY if) you have Real Player G2, you can click on the tune name below:
Hear Peapicker blues
Note 7/26/99 - The link above probably won't work. I made another version of it that I think works. If so, I'll explain it.
Bonus: The Real Producer does video, too. That is a whole 'nother subject, but just out of curiosity, I ran a badly recorded video capture through the Real Producer and had it generate a page. It's pretty bad - maybe 50% worse than the already-bad original. A lot of tweaking looks in order to get video files into acceptable shape for delivery on the web.
To see the results, click below - and again, this ONLY works for the latest version of Real Player, the G2.
See and hear Shao-Wanzi
From here