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Re: Soundbytes on a Website

Mark Kata wrote:
> I'm developing a website for a singer/songwriter and want to include 
>brief (30 second) samples of his songs.
> 
> I used the internal recorder in my PC while playing his CD on it.  When 
>I recorded an excerpt at "CD quality--mono" the file was 1.6MEG.  Then I 
>tried recording it at "Radio quality--mono" and the file was 700K.
> The 700K version took about 5 minutes to download from the Internet.
> What should I do to reduce the size of the file and make downloading 
>faster?

  There is a software technology called self-extracting files. These
files contain a very small decompression engine and compressed data. The
relatively small file is downloaded and then executed. The decompression
engine does it's magic and expands the file to it's natural state. The
file can then be played. The beauty is the person getting the file needs
no special software to expand the file.
  On your end, you need the utility to create the self-extracting file;
it will compress your sound file and insert the decompression engine.
  I have used this technology to move large graphic files between
computers on floppy disk. I don't recall any specific vendor names, but
you can probably find them easily by searching the net or calling a PC
store. I was using Macintoshes, but surely this technology exists for
PCs.

Motley