What is RealAudio?
What you need
How to use RealAudio
Tuning into Net.Radio

How the RealAudio plug-in can turn your Web browser into a radio.

What is RealAudio?

Sound on the Net has traditionally been delivered by downloading a sound file to your PC and then playing the file. RealAudio, on the other hand, uses a technology known as `streaming' to play sound live over the Internet.

It does this by send a constant flow of tightly compressed audio down the line. The signal is decompressed and played on your PC almost immediately the first bytes arrive rather than forcing you to wait until the download is complete.

This makes RealAudio ideal for live transmissions of music, sports and conference lectures as well as the most effective way to deliver shorter clips such as interviews, speeches and special presentations.

The RealAudio Player is a plug-in which, in version 2.0, works with Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, so you can use the Web as your launching pad. See Using Plug-ins if you'd like to learn more about plug-ins.

What you need

The RealAudio Player can be downloaded freely from the RealAudio site at www.realaudio.com.

RealAudio works best over a 28.8kbps modem; you'll also need a soundcard and speakers, of course. Depending on your ISPs' bandwidth and the material being played RealAudio can be akin to listening to a shortwave radio. At best, with a fast link to a local site, it's about the same as you'd hear from an AM radio. (Where else but on the Internet could you turn a $3000 Pentium PC into a $5 transistor radio? Ah, technology is indeed wonderful!)

We didn't find RealAudio up to par for playing background music while cruising the Web as the constant audio transfer chewed up most of the available bandwidth, and the idea of paying your ISP to listen to radio via the Net is not very appealing.

But RealAudio isn't a gimmick. It's already increased the multimedia richness of the Internet, with dozens of RealAudio servers coming on air around the world, and it paves the way for streaming to deliver live video and video-on-demand in the years ahead. RealAudio is also ideal for showing off the Internet to your not-yet-Netted friends, being second in `Wow!' factor only to the World Wide Web!

Using RealAudio

Once you've installed the player, surf your way to any RealAudio site and click on any RealAudio link -- the file extension is RA or RAM.

This will begin the audio stream transfer to your PC and, in a few seconds, launch the RealAudio player. The player is as easy to operate as any tape deck with the exception that you can't record the incoming sound.

A small portion of the incoming stream is stored in a local cache so that you can skip backwards and forwards, as you might do with a CD or cassette player. This also allows the RealAudio player to pause when interrupted by other processor-intensive tasks and then pick up where it left off when that task is finished.

Tuning into Net.Radio

The best place for your first Net audio experience is probably the RealAudio homepage at www.realaudio.com. But there are many more sites with RealAudio broadcasts on all sorts of topics, from the latest news to horoscope readings -- the TimeCast Web site at www.timecast.com provides a comprehensive listing.

Check out some great RealAudio sites now

By David Flynn