E-Mail With Sound: Grandma’s Waiting

If you bought a home computer within the last couple of years, the sales pitch likely included the word “multimedia.” That’s because your purchase probably included stereo speakers, a microphone and a CD-ROM drive to play disks that could bring forth animation and even movie clips.

But there is one part of the home computer world that has remained almost entirely monomedia. That’s e-mail.

There’s nothing wrong with the vast majority of e-mail consisting only of text. A text-only e-mail is an efficient, quick and cheap way to convey a memo, essay or heartfelt letter to someone who might be half a globe away.

But there are times when it’s nice to hear someone’s voice.

Short of an in-person visit, there is little that can more warm the heart of a grandparent than the sound of a grandchild’s greeting, not to mention early attempts at the piano. And for lovers who cannot be together, the emotions in a voice can convey much more than words on a computer screen.

Making sound e-mail to send over the Internet is not only possible, it’s very much within the scope of the home user who has a fairly up-to-date multimedia computer. The process is a bit cumbersome, however, and therefore probably not for beginners. Also, because sending sound e-mail involves several steps and a good deal more time than the text-only messages, it is best saved for special occasions.

The following instructions for making and sending sound e-mail are somewhat general. For help on specifics, you might have to get help from your neighborhood computer guru (probably a teenager) or your Internet provider.

If you are using the Windows platform, making the sound recording is easy. That platform comes with a program called Sound Recorder that you can use to not only record but even edit sound files.

If you’re on a Macintosh, you’ll have to download or get a sound recording program from another Mac user. I can recommend two shareware programs that are easy to use and widely available--Soundstudio-lite and Ultra Recorder. There are several others.

Using your microphone, you record your message. You’ll probably want to keep it fairly short--even with the sound compression methods mentioned below, the time needed to send and receive sound e-mail is much longer than with text-only messages.

When you have finished recording and saving your sound bite, it will be in the form of a file. You can send this file just as it is, if you and the recipient have plenty of patience.

As a test, I made a 30-second sound file in low-quality audio (for the technically minded, the sound recording program was set at 22 KHz and 8 bit). I then sent it without compression. It took three minutes and 45 seconds to upload. A higher-quality file, jammed with more data, would have taken much longer.

That means sending even a minute’s worth of Junior telling Grandma what he did in school today would take a minimum of about seven minutes to transmit. Grandma would then have to take about the same amount of time to download the message before she could hear it.

Compression solves the time problem, although the process will not likely go smoothly the first few times you try it.

If you’re an experienced Internet surfer, you probably already know about RealAudio, the groundbreaking compression program that allowed sound to be easily added to Web sites. You can use that same program for e-mail.

Unless you already have a Real-Audio player (it comes with the latest version of Netscape), you’ll have to download it from its site at https://www.realaudio.com. To make compressed sound e-mail, you’ll also need to download the RealAudio encoder from the same site.

Both the player and encoder are free. You’ll have to install them (check the instructions on the site) after they are downloaded.

OK, let’s imagine everything is now in place: the sound file you want to send, plus the RealAudio player and encoder.

To make the compressed file, you click on your sound file and drag it over the encoder. After a few seconds you will have a new file on your screen with a suffix of “.ra.” This is the compressed sound file, the one you will send.

Now you get ready to send e-mail in the regular way. You type in whatever text you want to include, and then ask your e-mail program to “attach” a file--the exact manner in which you do this depends on the e-mail program you use, but it probably won’t be difficult.

The e-mail program will then ask you what file you wish to “attach.” You choose the compressed sound file.

Then you hit the send button and off it goes.

I did a test with my original, 30-second file. The compressed version took only 25 seconds to send.

By the way, if you do send a file compressed in this manner, the recipient also will need to have the RealAudio player to hear it.

Wasn’t that fun? Now you know why most e-mail still consists of good old-fashioned text.

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Cyburbia’s e-mail address is david.colker@latimes.com.