From bobrankin@MHV.NET Fri Dec 19 01:09:42 1997 Date: Thu, 18 Dec 1997 17:44:52 -0500 From: Bob Rankin Reply-To: TOURBUS-Request@LISTSERV.AOL.COM To: TOURBUS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM Subject: TOURBUS - 18 Dec 1997 - Sound on the Net _________ ____________ ________ __________ _____________ ___ _ / | / | | / | \ | "Why | Surf When / You Can | Ride The | Bus?" / | \ |__________|__________/__________|__________|___________/ | \ / /______|----\ | WE'VE GOT ERNIE! Bob and Patrick have gotten | | | | their hands on the coveted SING & SNORE ERNIE |//////| | | dolls, and we're giving them away FRIDAY to a |//////| | | couple lucky TOURBUS PLUS riders! For details, |//////| | | visit http://www.TOURBUS.com/plus.htm |//////| | \________________________________________________________|______|____| / \ / \ / \ \___/ \___/ T h e I n t e r n e t T o u r B u s \___/ TODAY'S TOURBUS TOPIC: Sound on the Internet TODAY'S GUEST DRIVER : Bob Crispen Since Patrick is recovering from oral surgery, his father Bob Crispen will be filling in today, with the lowdown on Internet audio. Don't miss the "Links" at the very bottom! --Bob +-------------------------- SAVE MONEY -----------------------------+ Refill your inkjet printer. Black ink: $21.95/pint. Color: $23.95/pint. Call 1-888-728-2465 or visit our website +------------- --------------+ +----------300 Incredible Things to Do on the Internet---------------+ Get this great book to give as a gift during the holidays - only $7.95 Come to our site and learn why people are buying tons of this book! +-------------- ----------------------+ I've guest hosted for Patrick a couple of times, talking about VRML and some of the 3D treats that are coming to tickle your eyeballs on the net. But that's only one of our senses. As an amateur (*very* amateur) musician and composer I've had an interest in what might tickle your eardrums as well. The present: When you're talking about sound on the net, you've got three basic kinds of sound files: (a) Digital audio files: these are usually .wav files, though you occasionally see .au files and some of the other formats such as MPEG 1 and 2. These files are just like tape recordings of the music, and all they require your computer to do is turn the digits back into sounds, time them, and put them out through your speakers. The advantage of digital audio files is that you can record *anything* -- vocals, the sounds of particular instruments, and sound effects. The disadvantage, and right now it's a huge disadvantage on the net, is that these files are enormous and take forever to download. Instead of sitting around twiddling your thumbs while the file is downloading, it would be nice if you could start to play these files as they download, which brings us to: (b) Streaming digital audio: This could as easily fall under the first category, but since there's so much activity in this area, and since the way you play these files is so different from downloading and playing, I made this a separate category. RealAudio by RealNetworks (http://www.real.com/) -- formerly Progressive Networks -- is the file format that's earned the most mindshare on the net lately. But MPEG (a series of file formats standardized by the Moving Pictures Expert Group of ISO) (http://www.cselt.it/mpeg) and other formats can also be streamed, and the developing MPEG-4 standard is focused on streaming. At SIGGRAPH this year (http://www.siggraph.org/), some eyes bugged out at a demo of MPEG-4 streaming audio, video and 3D geometry! The advantage of streaming audio is that you can start listening almost as soon as the file starts downloading. The disadvantage is the same as for regular digital audio: you're still at the mercy of the bandwidth between the site and your machine. Even with an ISDN or T1 net connection, you can still get bogged down by a slow server. To help overcome this download bottleneck, the audio formats designed for streaming are compressed, using various proprietary and standard compression schemes. But this compression brings up another problem: uncompressing uses far more of your CPU power than playing regular digital audio does, so if you're planning to listen to a digital audio stream, you'd beter shut down some of your other applications unless you've got a really fast CPU. (c) MIDI: The Musical Instrument Digital Interface, standardized by the MIDI Manufacturers Association (http://home.earthlink.net/~mma/resource.htm) is a different way of delivering sound. It relies on your having a software or hardware MIDI instrument build into or attached to your computer. Nearly all PC soundcards have MIDI instruments, and some PC motherboards have MIDI instruments built in. Where digital audio (regular or streaming) is a digital representation of the sounds, a MIDI file is a series of instructions to your MIDI instrument: note on, note off, pan, change volume, bend pitch, and so on. The advantage of MIDI files is that they're small. Simple files with few instruments (and few controller messages like pitch bend) can run as low as 2K a minute (though 10K a minute is more typical). Regular .wav files are typically 2 megabytes a minute or more. The disadvantage of MIDI is that MIDI files depend on the quality of your MIDI instrument. Early sound cards had awful MIDI instruments. But MIDI instrument quality is only the start of the problems with MIDI. While you can record a .wav file of your latest composition and have a pretty good idea that your neighbor will hear it the way you recorded it, there's no such assurance with MIDI. That's because the General MIDI standard (http://www.eeb.ele.tue.nl/midi/GMGS.html) only specifies voices very loosely: what is patch #89 "Pad 1 (new age)" supposed to sound like? Is the Trombone (patch #58) supposed to be an orchestral trombone; a smooth, thin Tommy Dorsey trombone; a fat Kai Winding trombone; or any of a dozen other variants? While there's been some de facto standardization and agreements between manufacturers, sounds still vary a lot between sound cards in overall loudness (so the balance between instruments you worked so hard on goes right out the window) and envelope (the attack, sustain decay and release times and values). Finally, you're stuck with the 128 patches and 46 drums in the General MIDI spec. If you want an Allan Holdsworth guitar sound or even a kettledrum, tough luck. So a MIDI instrument is pretty limited in the sounds it can generate. Of course, so is a piano, and you can find some excellent MIDI files out there by composers who took the limitations of MIDI into account. The future: Since the main problem with MIDI (lousy MIDI instruments) has largely been solved -- it's just about impossible to get a truly awful MIDI instrument today, though naturally, quality does vary -- the MMA is tackling the remaining problems (differing sounds for the same patch and too few patches) with its DLS (Downloadable Sound) spec (http://home.earthlink.net/~mma/dls/dlsoview.htm). Hardware and software MIDI instruments conforming to this spec can play MIDI files containing not only notes and controllers, but also sounds and parameters (including envelopes). The folks at MIT are proposing an addition to the MPEG-4 spec called SAOL (Structured Audio Orchestra Language) (http://sound.media.mit.edu/~eds/mpeg4/) which intends to combine digital audio files with instrument instructions. Headspace (http://www.headspace.com/) have come up with a third future possibility for music on the net, called RMF (Rich Music Format), which includes both MIDI data and samples in a proprietary format which can include copyright notices and encryption. Their free Beatnik plugin for Netscape Navigator plays the RMF files that their editor (for which they charge) generates. One thing that bodes well for the credibility of this format is that Headspace's founder and CEO is synthesizer wizard Thomas Dolby. Putting your own audio on the web: If you have a website, you may be tempted to put a MIDI file or one of the digital audio format file on it. If you do, be aware of a couple of things: (a) If you record someone else's song, arrangement, or performance, you are probably in violation of copyright. The only truly safe songs to put on your webpage are your own compositions -- and here you run into the problem that someone may steal your work. Hey, they steal Elton John's songs, why not yours? (b) If you've got a file set up to play when your page loads, make sure you've got the controls for the player visible and accessible. Having a web page with no way to turn off the sound is the equivalent of turning your stereo up to 10 and leaving for the weekend. Instead of earning a reputation for being multimedia-savvy, you'll earn a reputation for being a bad neighbor. Links: http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Multimedia/Sound/ A pretty good introduction to the formats and links to the player and demo sites. news:alt.binaries.sounds.midi (this is a Usenet newsgroup) A pretty good place to find MIDI files. Bob Crispen - crispen@hiwaay.net +--------------------------------------------------------+ | WE'VE GOT ERNIE! Bob and Patrick have gotten | | their hands on the coveted SING & SNORE ERNIE | | dolls, and we're giving them away FRIDAY to a | | couple lucky TOURBUS PLUS riders! For details, | | visit http://www.TOURBUS.com/plus.htm | +--------------------------------------------------------+ =====================[ Tourbus Rider Information ]=================== The Internet Tourbus - U.S. Library of Congress ISSN #1094-2238 Copyright 1995-97, Rankin & Crispen - All rights reserved Archives on the Web at http://www.TOURBUS.com Join: Send SUBSCRIBE TOURBUS Your Name to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.AOL.COM Leave: Send SIGNOFF TOURBUS to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.AOL.COM =====================================================================