New updates & Looking for feedback: streaming audio

Folks:

A friend that I work with turned me on to
IBM Hot Media. It creates a java applet that
streams audio. I have my first working
copy at: http://www.virtulink.com/immp/video
Scroll down to Land of Vibration and check it
out. Does it stream properly? Does it make your
machine or browser hang up and crash?

There's also some new Shri Swifty videos
that I put up recently.

--
* D a v i d B e a r d s l e y
* xouoxno@virtulink.com
*
* 49/32 R a d i o "all microtonal, all the time"
* M E L A v i r t u a l d r e a m house monitor
*
* http://www.virtulink.com/immp/lookhere.htm

David B. wrote, after a fashion:

>Let's say it's below the name of the piece.
>If you're on a 56k modem this could take a
>minute or so. If you're using Netscape,
>you should see the progress of the download
>at the bottom of the screen.

As you noted in later posts (I'm digested), it varies widely in implementation on the different platform/browsers. Not to mention that the basic Java support itself varies in differing setups. This, coupled with the fact that you say the entire wave must be held in memory (did I grok that correctly?), would make this a very dubious choice for an inline/streaming tool. And, yes, it does take a while for the buttons to show up, which means that most surfers, not seeing anything but plain HTML links on the page, wouldn't have known anything about it.

With the quality that clunky (saving space because of the applet implementation), other ways seems a better way to go (then again, you did say it was an experiment).

>This is begining to remind me of working with
>a customer or maybe my 73 year old father.

Hey, easy. Don't diss the public until you are sure the technology isn't at fault (or, at least, isn't slam-dunk intuitive!). And this coming from someone who *likes* to do Java programming when time allows...

>Did anybody else check this out?

Me. BTW, since Joseph P. has also been banging his head on the streaming music wall, how about another facet to the whole thing: I've been reading posts on a webdesign list on a couple of sites using Shockwave to steam the audio. Why? Because there is almost no wait (it streams almost instantaneously) and anyone with the plugin gets it. The encoding, which I did not see discussed, sounds at least like better .mp3 encoding (128 bit or so). If it is of interest I'll try and find some of the commentaries/sites.

OK, enough beta testing... :)

Cheers,
Jon
`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`
Real Life: Orchestral Percussionist
Web Life: "Corporeal Meadows" - about Harry Partch
http://www.corporeal.com/