Fall 1999 p. 8

Tech Talk

by Eric Armstrong
a column on technology

The Sound of the Net: Getting the stuff you need from
the web

One of the better uses of the web for Voice and Speech professionals is the ability to transfer audio clips from one computer to another. Audio clips are just another kind of data that can be transferred as a file. They might be recorded directly to a computer, or recorded using a more conventional method, which is then imported into a digital format on a computer. There are many of these sound files available today, often with great samples of speakers with dialects and accents. One wonderful resource for these samples is IDEA, The International Dialects of English Archive <http://www.ukans.edu/~idea/>, created by founder/director Paul Meier and technical director/webmaster Shawn Muller at the University of Kansas. They currently have over 60 sound samples of dialects available for your use, completely free of charge; at approximately 3 minutes each, that’s over three hours of material! To get access to such files, you need to know how to download and play them.

The World Wide Web is primarily a means for storage, transfer and display of information kept in files. Most often, this is done by your computer requesting a file from a server (where the webs “pages” are stored), the file being transferred across the internet, and then being displayed via your browser, say Netscape Communicator or MS Internet Explorer. This transfer of files for display happens all the time on the Œnet. Your e-mail is another form of file transfer with which you’re familiar. Downloading is yet another, perhaps more complicated, form of file transfer.

There are many, many types of files that one might access from the web, all recognized by their three or four letter acronyms preceded by a “dot”. The most common are .HTML files (HyperText Markup Language), which are the kinds of files used for the text and its display in your browser, along with images. Other file formats include image formats, such as .JPEGs and .GIFs, video formats like .AVIs and QuickTime .MOVs. Sound files can be created in many, many formats, each with a complicated acronym and a long story behind it. Some of the older formats include .AIFF, .AU, .SND, and .WAV. Each format was developed for a specific user-group (for users of Macintosh, Windows or UNIX computers, for instance) and handles how much information about the sound sample gets stored in the digital sound file. Traditionally, the more information, the higher the sound quality would be; however, more information means larger file sizes and slower file transfers.

Recently, sound formats have been developed which allow for compression of the sound information into very small file sizes. The most famous of these new file formats is MP3, a variation of a file format first developed for video, which is called MPEG (Motion Picture Expert Group). It maintains the near-CD quality of the sample, while reducing the file size almost ten-fold. For instance, one internet source reported that, “the approximate number of minutes to download a regular CD- size file of the Beatles’ “Love Me Do” (using a 56K modem) is more than 40 minutes, while the approximate number of minutes to download an MP3 file of the Beatles’ “Love Me Do” (using a 56K modem) is less than 4 minutes. MP3s became popular mostly because of college students who, realizing the superb quality of the sound files and the ease with which they can be used, began to copy (called “ripping”) music from their CDs. Some unscrupulous students even chose to serve them up for free over the internet. With crackdowns on this kind of behavior, MP3s have moved into the mainstream, as they have become commercially viable.

Though MP3s have been synonymous with pirated music in the past that is certainly not where they are today. A whole industry has developed around the format, including a plethora of portable MP3 players (à la Walkman), which allow users to transfer files from their computers to a small chip inside the device. They can either download files from the Œnet, or compile mixes from their own collection. And since there are no moving parts, the sound never skips, jogs, or rolls as is might with a portable CD player or cassette player. Shawn Muller of IDEA points out that “MP3 has allowed many independent musicians to have their music heard.” One of the most vigorous supporters of the format is MP3.COM, a web site designed to support new music on MP3, available for free or for purchase from the recording artists themselves, thereby avoiding the big players in the recording studios. However, the Recording Industry has jumped on the bandwagon and developed their own take on the situation, with new formats, and some studios are now choosing to release albums by famous artists in MP3 format. (Students remain the most familiar with this software revolution--you may find that your students are excited to download and listen to samples of sounds you might put on the web in MP3 format.)

MP3s aren’t the only format on the block; RealAudio and QuickTime are also very popular right now. RealAudio was developed to “stream” audio and video over the net, sending the file in little chunks of highly compressed signal, so that you can listen to the file almost immediately. Commercial Radio and TV networks and producers use it to deliver streaming audio or video content. The sound quality isnt as good as MP3, though this continues to improve as RealNetworks keeps updating updating the possibilities of their product. QuickTime has the ability to simulate streaming, so you can play audio and video as soon as possible after beginning the download. QuickTime 4 was made famous when the trailer for the new Star Wars movie was released via the internet to over six million viewers in its first week. It is of interest to voice and speech people because it can allow you to add text tracks to your sound files, thereby creating a Karaoke-style surtitle, which you can use to follow the words spoken. I use it for transcriptions, and have implemented it successfully in classes to loop sound and IPA, allowing students to participate in the analysis of a complex dialect sample. As Shawn Muller says, “In the end, it comes down to personal preference. What am I going to use this file for? What are my customers [clients, students, etc.] going to use this file for? MP3 is very rapidly becoming the standard for the music industry on the web, while QuickTime and RealAudio have become the standards for video.”

To download a sound file, you usually just click (right or left click depending on your browser or operating system) on the files link on a web page. You want to make sure that you are saving the file to your hard-drive. This allows you to keep the file on your computer, and if you have sound outputs, you can then record the files to audio cassette, should you so desire. However, to listen to the file, you have to have a Player, to play back the audio*. Your browser cant do this automatically. To get the Player, you need to download it (usually for free!) from the internet. Unfortunately, with so many browsers and operating systems, space won’t allow me to explain how to download for every configuration. Usually, the download process goes like this. First, find the file or player you want to download. Click on the link to the file and the file will either be saved to a default location on your hard-drive, or your browser will ask you where you want to save the file. Once the file has finished downloading, process it by either opening the sound file in your player, or by installing the software to your computer. This is exactly the same process that you go through when you purchase software from a store, put a CD in your CD-ROM drive and set up the software.

However, there may be one extra step before you can begin. You may need to “unzip” or decompress your files first. This is done with an “extraction” utility, such as StuffIt for the Mac or WinZip for Windows. Finally, you may have to configure your browser, so that when you click on a sound file it will automatically open in the right application.

There are many MP3 players available now for your computer. For Windows platform computers, there are over one-hundred, and nearly twenty for the Macintosh. The most well known include MacAmp for Macintosh, WinAmp, MusicMatch, or Sonique for Windows and X11Amp and Xaudio for Unix/Linux. The easiest place to find these is at MP3.COM, and they include guides for even the freshest rookie. Some of these players, most notably RealPlayer G2 or QuickTime 4 for either Mac or Windows, were designed for other formats. Shawn Muller points out that “this shows that they don’t want to lose their audience by alienating a very popular file format.” So it may turn out that you dont have to download a player after all, if you already have the most recent
versions of these players.

Downloading files and players may be a complicated task, which, on a computer with a slower connection to the internet, may take some time. As your connection gets faster, via a fast connection at work, or via a cable or DSL modem at home, larger and larger file exchanges become easier and less worrisome. But even with the resources available now, downloading is becoming an essential skill to receive material from the web. The next step for more confident/advanced users will be to learn how to save files to a server, or “upload” them, so that they can share their sound files with students, clients, colleagues, and the world.

For more information on MP3s, visit MP3.COM at <http://www.mp3.com/>. IDEA, the International Dialects of English Archive, is located on the web at <http://www.ukans.edu/~idea/>. For a small example of a QuickTime sound and text file, checkout <http://faculty.roosevelt.edu/armstrong/courses/sounds/fbv20.mov>. (Remember that these addresses should have no spaces in them when you type them into your browser.)

* You may also need a sound card and perhaps even speakers, should your computer lack the hardware to play sound files. Many older computers may still be missing this essential component, while almost all new computers come with some multimedia capability. back to where you left off reading

Eric Armstrong is the Voice, Speech & Dialects Guy at Roosevelt University’s
Theatre Program. He writes this column for the VASTA News and maintains the vasta.org web site and his own site, the voice + speech source, at www.roosevelt.edu/speech/ .

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