The encoder and player are free and versions of each are available for Intel based PC's, Apple Mac's and Unix boxes. If you have a soundcard and speakers, RealAudio can make a drastic difference to the experience of browsing - the "click" . . . wait . . ."click" . . . wait pattern of HTTP transfers becomes an unbroken media stream. If you have a WWW site then streamed or "pseudo-streamed" RealAudio can help you make the leap from "pages" to "streamed multimedia modules".

    RealAudio is undoubtedly the best of the current audio streaming plug-ins and the first real step towards truly streamed media.