I just was looking for an encoder that would work & it just so happens
that I decided realnetworks was best for a couple reasons. It compressed the audio file,
it streams & it seems to be a fairly widely used plug in. There
is a free version and a plus version that has reasonable cost & includes
upgrades for a year - free. There it is.
For troubleshooting purposes, I plan to put a link on every page to play the file and a link to right click & save the file. I've played enough to know that sometimes internet congestion will cause the audio file to time out, so for anyone who might want to just download the file & then play it can do that. What you do with it after that, that'sa your business. However I copyright all the audio files I put out there, so if you want to use it on your page or whatever, please ask permission.
Here are the links to check system requirements for the currently available *FREE* programs from real
How do you code the real audio links?
This is a great question. I'm glad you were wondering. Once you have hooked up a tape recorder to your sound card and made wav files of your favorite speaker tapes & used the encoder software to translate the wav file into a *.ra (3.1) or *.rm file (5.1 or G2), you will find that it doesn't work to just hard code the links into your html pages.
"It doesn't work!!," you will say.
Here is what you do
What you do, is ftp the *.ra or *.rm file out to the site (don't forget to switch the ftp protocol to 'bin' for this is a binary file)
Then take your txt editor (don't use word -- use notepad -- word puts extra crud in the text)
and create a file named *.ram
make it a single line file that reads (with no quotes) "http://rootlocation/*.ra" for 3.1
or "http://rootlocation/*.rm" for 5.0 or G2
where rootlocation is the internet address of the file exactly where you put it and * is the name of the file and rm or ra is the extention that the encoder used.
So if you got a page at xoom, your ram file would be something like
http://members.xoom.com/yourname/nameofrealaudiofile.ra
if you got one from tripod, your ram file would be something like
http://members.tripod.com/~yourname/nameofrealaudiofile.ra
You ARE going to want to find a large host site. Because 10 meg is gone with just a couple files when they are 2-4 meg apiece. One thing to know - YES - fortunecity lets you have 20 MEG. oops - the largest file you can have with them is 1 meg. Hey! So you can put 20 clips out there that are about 15 minutes apiece. Sounds ok. I'd rather have the larger files.
So, *really*, How do you CODE the real audio links?
The code that is the link in the html bracket a href="http://rootlocation/*.ram" goes right into the html document.
When you ftp the single line text file that you made with the notepad, it can be in ascii mode.
Clicking on the link loads up the *.ram file which brings up your default real networks audio / video player and the *.ram file contains the link to the file with the speaker tape.
But don't believe me. You can read all about it at http://www.real.com.
If you've read this far, obviously you're thinking about making your own audio link page -
be it recovery oriented - or not. Thanks for letting me share with you -
So if you make your own, please email me at realslow@dmv.com & let me know so I can link to your audio page.
Don't forget - everything is always case sensitive with this stuff.
Take my advice - do everything in lowercase. Be consistent *.htm or *.html and don't go too crazy with the OnMouseOver and OnMouseOut commands. Older ie browsers don't support that stuff anyway.
Nice? That'sa so nice.
May God continue to bless you.
Mike