Help Playing Clips

Help with Playing the Clips

Caution: RealAudio "RealOne" Player
Unfortunately my experience with RealAudio's latest player, called RealOne, has not been positive. Sure, it plays all the audio stuff OK, but as a piece of software I found it very intrusive into my computer system. For example it continually ran a little program (rndal.exe) on my computer that seemed to want to call back to the RealAudio web site. Is this thing a player or a virus? I've removed it from my systems. I will continue to provide RealAudio samples out on my web sites because they are small and can stream on slow connections, but I can no longer endorse the RealAudio products nor can I recommend that you install them. I'd recommend going with MP3 audio players instead.

Is there an alternative RealAudio player? Yes! My friend Jeff let me know about RealAlternative, which is a little decoder for RealAudio (among other things). I loaded up version 1.46 with the Firefox browser, and it's working fine. Nice!

Hey, yeah, all this Internet technology is cool, but it's pretty funky to understand---and you can't quite figure out how to play these darn clips!!! Let's see what we can do here...And we'll start with the basics.
You do have a computer with a sound card and speakers or headphones, right? Good! If not, well...Stay on my e-mail list and I'll let you know when I release my first CD. :-)

What are the sound clips?
I recorded the songs right to the PC in my studio and used some special software to turn them into sound clips that you can listen to and get from the Internet. The "Streaming RealAudio" stuff can be listened to by most people right from the Internet (that's called "streaming audio"), but it's of somewhat low quality. The MP3 ("MPEG level 3") stuff is of much higher quality (almost CD quality!), but for most people it's not practical to listen to it while dialed in, so folks usually just copy the MP3 files to their PC to listen to the clip (that's called "downloading" the file).

What I will likely do in the future is have a small streaming RealAudio song snippet available with an MP3 of much better sound quality available for download. You can take a quick listen to a small, streaming file before downloading the much bigger (but much better) full version.

More information about the song formats:
- The RealAudio Web Site
- The MP3 Web Site

The original recordings were made with Cakewalk software, by the way.

What do you need to play the tunes?
You need a special player on your computer, but you may already have it! Follow the instructions below to attempt to play the songs. If they do not work, then you need to download a player. Don't worry, the players are plentiful and free!

RealAudio and MP3:
- Go to the RealAudio web site and grab and install their free player. Their latest version plays RealAudio as well as MP3 files. How convenient! But before you head over to that site to download the RealAudio player software, please see the Caution statement above, OK?

RealAudio:
- If you do not want to use the RealPlayer, try out the RealAlternative. It works just fine in Firefox, but it can also be integrated with Internet Explorer, and there's a standalone media player (I have not tried these).

MP3 only:
- The most popular MP3 player has to be WinAmp. What a neat piece of shareware! Worth checking out.
- Microsoft's Windows Media Player plays MP3 files, too.
- Next, try the MP3 web site for more MP3 players. There are tons of free and shareware players just waiting for you!
- The Windows Media Player that comes in with Microsoft Windows (under Accessories->Multimedia) can also play MP3 files.

More information about playing the sound clips
There are several ways to play the song clips. Choose the one that works best for you!

Streaming RealAudio:
- Click on the "Streaming RealAudio" song clip. If you have a 56Kb modem, it should start up the RealAudio player and you'll hear the tune. Results will vary with slower modem speeds.
- If your RealAudio player is already running, you can do File->Open Location... and enter the URL to the song you wish to play.
- If you get an error, it's probably because the web site is slow. You should probably download the audio instead (see below).

Download RealAudio, Download MP3:
- Hold down the right mouse button on top of the "Download" link. Choose "Save Target As..." or "Save Link As..." and enter the name of a file.
- If you choose "Download RealAudio", the name of the file you choose should have .ra or .rm as its extension, such as kltune1.ra. For "Download MP3" the file extension is .mp3. Remember this file and its location on your disk so you can play it later on.
- When the file has finished downloading, open your MP3 or RealAudio player and do File->Open... and call up the name of the file you downloaded (or just double-click on the downloaded file's name). You do not need to be connected to the Internet to play a file you've stored locally.
- You can click on any "Download" link and see if you can play it right from the Internet. Those with very fast connections (cable modems) probably can, but most everyone else won't be able to. For sites that block MP3 streaming I have renamed the .mp3 extension to .aaa, so the only way you can play those clips is to download them to your hard drive with the correct .mp3 extension (see the previous instruction). Apologies for the inconvenience.

What's "Hi" and "Lo"?
- Hi - indicates the file is of higher quality. For RealAudio, it means it is optimized for when you have a 56Kb modem (or faster), but even this "Hi" quality mode of RealAudio is not as good as MP3, which is usually "Hi" quality!
- Lo - indicates that the file is of lower quality. For RealAudio, it means that it is optimized for when you have a 28.8Kb modem (or faster).
Select the highest quality your modem connection will handle, or download the file to your machine and play it there when you're off-line.

Remember: If you download a file to play it on your computer, you don't have to reconnect to the Internet to hear it again!

"RIO" / MP3 personal stereo users: These MP3 files have been shown to work in a RIO.

If you run into trouble, please e-mail me!