Streaming Audio: The FezGuys Guide

Chapter 3 Using RealMedia

Chapter 4 Using Windows Media

Chapter 5 Using QuickTime

Chapter 6 Using MP3

Chapter 7 Serving Your Audio

Aggressive competition for market share between the companies behind the big streaming formats has been both good and bad. On the one hand, it means a broad user base for authors, rapid technological development, and lower (or free) prices for software tools. On the other hand, it means a dizzying array of new products with very similar features released many times each year. The good news is that the importance of backward compatibility is being recognized in new encoding software releases. This means that content authored using today's encoding and production tools will still play using next year's version.

A note of definition: Content we author for on-demand streaming we call "files" and when authoring live streams we use "streams."

If you don't already have a free format-specific player on your computer, now would be a good time to download and install it. You'll need it soon enough to listen to your encoded files and check out what (and how) others author their streaming audio.

The Step-by-Step tutorials in this Part make the following assumptions:

• On-demand Files You'll take raw source AIFF (Mac users) or WAV (Windows users) files and encode them into compressed streaming files. For help capturing to AIFF or WAV files, see the Step-by-Step, "Getting Your Source into Digital Format," in Chapter 2, "Preparing Yourself."

• How To Do It (Processes)Live Streams You'll be feeding a live input into your authoring computer's soundcard.

• How To Do It (Processes)Target Audiences Both on-demand files and live streams will be authored for two listening audiences: 56k dial-up modems and 384k DSL users.

• How To Do It (Processes)Audio Content You'll be encoding music with vocals in stereo as your source audio.

For more information on any format, see the Appendix, "Tools and Resources."