Sound and audio are digitally rendered in different formats.  This chart will briefly explain how each one of these formats works.  When you click on a File  button, such as real  you may be asked to get a plug-in.  Plug-ins are the engines that allow you to hear, and or see the files in various formats. Plug-ins can be downloaded and added to your browser to automatically play the sounds. You may have to try a second time on the button if you get a file not found message.

MP3 is the newest compression technique used on my site, This format has almost a CD quality sound at 10 to 1 compression. To hear Mp3 you will need to download the player. I have one ready to download here. Once you have the player you download the songs to play them

Real audio uses alot of compression to keep the file sizes small. I am able to use entire 4 minute songs and keep the file around 400k  The sound quality is a bit slushy sounding but you get the idea of the songs. If you are using netscape 3.0 chose "Save File" after you click on the Real Audio button and see "unknown file type". Explorer will automatically download.You need a Real Audio player to hear the files. Click here to download the free player from Real audio and see a further explanation of the streaming feature. I hope to add this feature soon.

WAV. files are very common on the Internet. They are used primarily by Microsoft's Windows 95. Both Netscape navigator and Internet Explorer can play WAV. files with their media player. You may need a plug-in to play WAV files if you have an older version of Netscape or explorer. Wav files are very large so the sound clips I use are shorter clips of the songs.

Gif Anim is my own creation. I combined GIF animation with a looped WAV file. The idea is to create a large "movie"  with sound in a small file size. The draw back is that the animation  will not be in sync with the visual and the sound will be repetitive. This should give the viewer the impression of a live show and keep the download time short.

Quick time works well with both Mac and and Windows. Although QuickTime does not provide video streaming for the Internet, the quality of these videos is pretty good.  All browsers require a plug-in to view QuickTime videos. Downloads also require alot of time because these files are often very large.  Click here for the plug-in.

Real video is also a form of streaming video and audio. The video quality is quite marginal It downloads in an amazingly short time for video.  The video images appear almost as a slide show but that's okay, the idea here is to listen to the music with some visuals .

AVI files are native to Microsoft Windows and work with the multimedia player.  These files can be viewed with Netscape has embedded videos, however, these files are rather large.  A good video that is 15 seconds long can be as large as 6-7 MB in size.  These files to do not stream and cannot be viewed in their entirety until they are completely downloaded.

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