The sound clips and demos on this site can be played, if your computer has installed on it the Windows Media Player, as real time streaming audio over the web. This player is by far the most popular one as it comes pre-installed as standard on most computers, which is a very good reason to use it. At the simple click of a mouse, what you will hear is clean, but detail reduced, squelchy ‘ sponge like’ sound quality renditions of my music! At dial-up transmission speed of 32Kb/s, this is just about OK for demo purposes over the web but not much else. With such high data compression the player is obviously making nearly all of it up! The player responds immediately but, it does take a little while for it to connect and initialise the sound buffers. Sound demos are about 1 - 1.5 minutes long.

To get the latest version of WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER...
APPLE MACS generally come with their own “ iTunes” player which unfortunately doesn’t recognise windows media files, however Bill has thought of this. A click on the icon will take you to the Microsoft website where you can download the latest free version for Macs. The latest PC version can also be obtained free from Microsoft if you don’t have it.

STREAMING AUDIO and GAPS...
In case you didn’t already know, when you play streaming audio over the web, the player firsts sets up a large data storage buffer memory block in your computer. Requested music is then received in an unsteady stream of separate data packets. Once enough packets have been received and stored in the memory block for the player to think it will be able to bridge most subsequent gaps caused by the current web transmission conditions, the player starts to steadily decode data and play the sounds from the memory block. This is why you have to wait a few moments for the thing to set itself up. As long as the data packets keep on arriving fast enough to maintain some data in the buffer, the sound will be continuous. If not the sound stops until the buffer fills up enough and you unfortunately get gaps in the sound. This can easily happen when the web or the servers are busy, or if you just have a slow connection. It’s not perfect by any means and it’s not instant start, but it is great to be able to get some kind of real time sound over the web. The middle of the evening is a good time to avoid. Late night or early morning is more likely to give you a gap free play. I’ve tried out the music links several times using an high speed ethernet connected link and the Freeuk server seems pretty good at delivering the goods. I’ve had gaps occasionaly on my own machine (56K modem) at peak times when the net was generally sluggish.

Windows Media & MP3 information .

MP3 format is also used for some clips as an alternative, for downloading or, if you wish to, play as streaming audio. However most players including the Windows Media Player can play both MP3 and WMA so most people will be able to play both without problem. At the 32Kb/s slow bit rates of dial-up streaming audio, personally I think Windows Media Format sounds better generally than MP3, which is another reason why most of my sound clips are *.WMA files. Anyone who has visited my site from time to time will notice no Real Audio clips anymore. WMA in my opinion sounds much better than Real Audio at slow bit rates and I never liked the way the player tried to take over your computer.

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