Voice, music, and other sounds recorded and stored in analog or digital form. The term RealAudio refers to a helper-app (plug-in) that allows WWW users to hear audio files in real time. Options for creating and playing digital audio Java applets are reviewed in deCarmo (1996) . Options for converting written text into audio are given in Text reading . (See also Sound board , AU , AIF , Board , Hertz , Java , MIDI , Speech recognition , Text reading , Video/audio networking , and Wave file ) The Web is Alive With the Sound of MP3," Newsweek, February 22, 1999, Page 16.
http://www.MP3.com (hours of free downloads, including the New York Times MP3s.)
http://www.audiogalaxy.com (lots of samples and free downloads.)
Go to the Frequently Asked Questions at http://www.MP3.com . MP3 is a file format which stores audio files on a computer in such a way that the file size is relatively small, but the song sounds near perfect. You can identify MP3 files because they will end in MP3. Typically 1 MB is equal to one minute of music or several minutes for spoken work/audiobooks. This is about a 90% reduction in hard drive space and bandwidth vis-a-vis uncompressed high quality wav files, but the actual savings depends upon the recording quality of your wav files. If you think about a CD-ROM holding 650 Mb, this translates to over 11 hours of high quality audio in MP3 format. More importantly, MP3 audio does not require as much Internet bandwidth as previous audio alternatives.
Also see Web streaming