Humming Along with the Web
By Lincoln D. Stein
My eyes, or ears rather, were recently opened to the fact that there is more to the Web than just text and graphics. The Web can deliver audio, and pretty good audio at that.
Three events conspired to bring the existence of Web sound to my attention. First, I finally got the right sound driver installed for the sound card in my ancient Linux box at home, enabling it to emit more than beeps. Second, I bought my wife a Diamond Multimedia Rio portable MP3 player for her birthday. While she was busy digitizing her CD collection, I began to browse the various Internet music sites to see what was out there and slowly became aware of a world of online audiophiles and music databases of which I had been blissfully unaware.
Then, most recently, I received an autographed CD from Elisa M Welch, one of the editors at Web Techniques. It turns out that while by day Elisa toils in the cube farms of Miller Freeman correcting the grammar of hapless columnists, by night she is a "countercultural ethnomusician," a singer/songwriter who specializes in Left-Coast Neo-Celtic Folk. Elisa's first CD is The Wheel—a collection of original and traditional songs that roughly chronicle the endless cycle of seasons. This column chronicles my own experiences creating MP3 samples from one of the songs on the CD (with Elisa's permission) and making it available in Web-accessible form. (Listen to the demo.)
Getting the Lingo Right
There's a whole world of technology involved in capturing audio data from CDs, compressing them into manageably sized files, and serving them over the Internet.
