RealAudio

[Paul Mather]

On Thu, 19 Sep 1996, Martyn White wrote:

>         Has anyone checked this out?  It's incredible.  I'm
> listening to virgin radio from London over the internet.

So far as I am aware, RealAudio is still basically only up to AM radio
quality.  If you class that as "incredible," I have an "incredible"
sounding copy of the One Way _Hawkwind_ CD I'd be willing to sell you. :-)

There are several "audio streaming" technologies available on the WWW
(e.g. CoolTalk, Internet Wave, etc.), with RealAudio being probably the
most widespread in use.

The insidious thing about RealAudio is that it uses UDP for data transfer.
This makes it far less amenable to filtering, controlling, etc.
Basically, this means it can suck the life force out of your available
network bandwidth, leaving all your regular TCP consumers crying into
their beer.  But so long as at least one person on a subnet can listen to
the cricket scores in peace, that's the important thing. ;-)

(Don't laugh, but Virginia Tech broadcast the live commentary to their
most recent American Football game over the Internet using RealAudio
during the game.)

>         So when can someone set up a Realaudio server for
> BOC and HW?

Again, last I heard, the RealAudio server was not available for free (or,
if it was, it was a stripped-down 1 channel version; the more "channels"
you buy [the # of users who can listen simultaneously], the more expensive
it is).  This is unlike several other audio streaming variants.  Also, I
believe the compression software you need to make RealAudio sound files is
not freely available.  This is all last time I looked, quite some time
ago.  The situation may now have changed.

As for a BOC/HW RealAudio server, there would be the little matter of
gross copyright violation... :-)

Cheers,

Paul.

obCD: Kyuss, _Blues For The Red Sun_

e-mail: paul at csgrad.cs.vt.edu                    A stranger in a strange land.