[buug] Streaming Audio Question

[Zeke Krahlin]

On Wed, 16 Aug 2000, Rick Moen wrote:

> If memory serves, Real Networks sued a company that made a compatible
> product, and won.  (I think that was video, but the lesson is still
> present.)

Thank you for your well-informed account of the present situation with
streaming audio. You have spared me from wasting a lot of time, only to
discover what I need is not available for a reasonable price. 

I am familiar with all the other sound formats, including .au and .wav.
However, I can't do this without streaming audio. My interviews run about
20-40 minutes, which I have broken down into 10mb audio file segments. No
one on the web is going to bother to download such long files, before
listening to them.

The demo for Real Player has the conversion to .ram option disabled, so I
can't even sample it.

So as last resort I may be stuck with Windoze Media format .wmf. So I
downloaded their package, including "Windows media encoder", which is
supposed to convert large audio files into streaming format. However,
after installing it, the actual executable remains nonexistant. I've
search my entire hard drive for it, and it is not here. So the install is
crippled for some reason.

Anyway, where there's a will, there's a way, and I will have my way!

> What you're really looking for in the long term is something like the
> Ogg Vorbis project's work-in-progress:  http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/
> 100% free formats and free code, but it's not really usable, yet.

Well, more power to them! Streaming audio has become, IMO, a de facto
standard, and should not be held prisoner to the profit motive. Thanks
again, Rick.

---
"Zeke Krahlin" <ezekielk at weak.org> 
Linux: the people's OS.
A billion communists can't be wrong!