Audio

Voice, music, and other sounds recorded and stored in analog or digital form. The term RealAudio refers to a helper-app (plug-in) that allows WWW users to hear audio files in real time. Options for creating and playing digital audio Java applets are reviewed in deCarmo (1996) . Options for converting written text into audio are given in Text reading . (See also Sound board , AU , AIF , Board , Hertz , Java , MIDI , Speech recognition , Text reading , Video/audio networking , and Wave file ) The Web is Alive With the Sound of MP3," Newsweek, February 22, 1999, Page 16.http://www.MP3.com (hours of free downloads, including the New York Times MP3s.)http://www.audiogalaxy.com (lots of samples and free downloads.)Go to the Frequently Asked Questions at http://www.MP3.com .&nbsp MP3 is a file format which stores audio files on a computer in such a way that the file size is relatively small, but the song sounds near perfect. You can identify MP3 files because they will end in MP3. Typically 1 MB is equal to one minute of music or several minutes for spoken work/audiobooks.&nbsp This is about a 90% reduction in hard drive space and bandwidth vis-a-vis uncompressed high quality wav files, but the actual savings depends upon the recording quality of your wav files. &nbsp If you think about a CD-ROM holding 650 Mb, this translates to over 11 hours of high quality audio in MP3 format.&nbsp More importantly, MP3 audio does not require as much Internet bandwidth as previous audio alternatives.Also see Web streaming