The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : The Hear and Now of Making Sound on the Internet
It should be clear by now to anyone who spends a little time cruising around on-line that multimedia--pictures, sound, even video--is coming to cyberspace, albeit haltingly. But if you really want a glimpse of where the Internet is going and why it is the prototype for any future information highway, consider three of the most intriguing new technologies on the cyberspace scene.
This week and for the next two as well, we’ll explore live sound, video conferencing and Internet phone, investigating what makes these technologies so important--and, of course, explaining how you can try them out today.
Let’s start with RealAudio, which will soon make the Internet something as much heard as it is seen. RealAudio, the product of a Seattle company called Progressive Networks, turns the Internet into a device offering what amounts to radio on demand by eliminating the need for users to download gigantic audio files in order to hear their contents.
Using RealAudio software on a personal computer or a Macintosh equipped with a sound card, you can use the World Wide Web to find a sound file that seems interesting, click it and-- voila!-- play it on the spot. Not only does this save downloading time, it also saves space on your perennially glutted hard drive.
Progressive Networks has cleverly decided to give away the software you need to play RealAudio files, much as Adobe decided to give away the “reader” you need to view documents in its Acrobat format. Doing so helps establish a standard. To get your RealAudio software, point your Web browser at RealAudio’s Home Page (https://www.realaudio.com) and register as a beta user. Progressive Networks will immediately e-mail you a password permitting download of the player software. RealAudio is also giving away a program you can use to encode sound files for RealAudio playback.
Using RealAudio requires a little computing power. The Windows version, for instance, demands a 486-33 and eight megabytes of RAM. But more and more users meet this requirement, and in the not too distant future, everyone will. Although it won’t work with the Prodigy or America Online built-in browsers, RealAudio will work with the browser that comes with CompuServe. (If you’re using an old-fashioned shell account with the Internet Adapter running on the host, RealAudio won’t work for you, either.)
RealAudio is relatively new, but already you can listen to National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” and ABC-TV’s Peter Jennings in RealAudio format. These and many other RealAudio programs are available from the RealAudio home page. You can also find some at Carl Malamud’s https://www.town.hall.org. Malamud has been using the Internet to distribute a radio show for some time now, and offers a number of programs in RealAudio.
In testing RealAudio, I found good news and bad news. The good news is that downloading and installing the software, at least with Netscape as your browser, is extremely easy; just remember to close Netscape before you install the RealAudio player. From then on it operates pretty much hands-free.
The bad news is that the sound quality wasn’t very good. It turns out that RealAudio sound quality varies depending on how far away the sound data lives, how busy the Web site happens to be, the quality of the recordings when they were RealAudio encoded, and the quality of the speakers attached to your computer. At 14,400 b.p.s. modem speeds, the best that can be hoped for is something like AM radio. I got sound that ranged from tolerable to this-guy’s-talking-from-the-bottom-of-a-swimming-pool.
I am convinced that the quality of Internet sound-on-demand will improve substantially as users gain access to increasing bandwidth and better computers, and as the RealAudio technology (or that of some competitor) gets better. The technology is just too compelling not to improve, and Progressive Networks President Rob Glaser, once head of multimedia at Microsoft, vows that this will happen.
In any event, RealAudio is clearly catching on, and if you have Web access and your computer is up to the job of running the RealAudio player program, you’ll certainly want to give it a try.
That’s something you can do today, but consider the possibilities created by RealAudio for tomorrow. First of all, one need never miss a radio program. You like “Car Talk” on NPR? Were you interviewed somewhere yourself? Do you want to hear a show carried only in another city? Just click and play. It doesn’t matter if the program is a long one; once you click, you can turn up the speakers, lie down on the sofa and relax. There’s no need to sit at the PC, the way you would to read something on screen.
RealAudio is an example of time-shifting, a more important phenomenon for TV than for radio, since so much radio is consumed opportunely--traveling in a car, for instance. Nevertheless, this is truly radio on demand. It’s place-shifting as well. Someday, I hope, I will have access to radio broadcasts of New York Yankees baseball all summer long, even though I live in Los Angeles.
Even more important, one no longer needs an FCC license or a broadcast tower to get into radio. Web sites that employ RealAudio server software--this is where the company makes its money--can carry RealAudio files. I predict this server software will spread like wildfire, so that before long, anyone can generate radio--or more broadly, music, advertising, readings, instructions, anything that can be heard--and post it as part of a World Wide Web page. You could even charge people to listen.
That’s not to say that the Internet is the end of Ken & Bob or any of those other early morning guys, or traffic reports and so on. But it does suggest where the Internet is going--in the direction of making everyone and anyone a mass communicator, even if the mass is just a few thousand aficionados of Tibetan chants who happen to be spread all over the world. I think it’s incredibly exciting.
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Daniel Akst welcomes messages at akstd@news.latimes.com
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Radio Free Net
You’ll find an extensive list of places that offer RealAudio sound on the RealAudio home page at https://www.realaudio.com. A good one to try is Radio HK, which “broadcasts” exclusively via the Internet. It’s right here in Southern California at https://www.hkweb.com/radio/, and the sound quality seems a little better than most.
