optimism

>That's four seconds at (if telephony-grade WAV files are fine for such
>illustrative purposes) 8K bytes per second, or 32K bits. At a connection
>rate of 33.6Kbps (I average closer to 42Kbps) that would probably take
>somewhere around three seconds to download, including a lot of overhead.

Gary, you may be connected to your ISP at 42K/s, but when's the last time
you got anything across the net faster than 3K/s? I get 56.6 but seldom do
better than 2K/s.

Telephone quality is not good enough for subtle differences in intonation.
Barely making it is 22K/s with 16 bit samples, at which a 2 second sound
byte would take almost 6 minutes to download at 2K/s.

Real audio is definitely not mp3. Players for both formats are free, but
encoders cost for both, unless you're willing to infringe on the mp3
encoder patent. Both do streaming, of course, but this isn't a concern on
a list.

I have to agree with John ff, HTML is not acceptable for email. Only MS
mail, Netscape mail, and late-model versions of Eudora will even display
it, to my knowledge. If you're using "wysiwyg" editors to make the
message, you can almost guarantee it will look like total crap, maybe even
to somebody else on the same platform running the same software.

Carl

> Gary, you may be connected to your ISP at 42K/s, but when's the last time
> you got anything across the net faster than 3K/s?

By the way, I just did some surfing around, and Netscape reported around
1.8K per second. But those are bytes, not bits.

I usually get between 200bytes/sec and 400bytes/sec with Mozilla, but
that ignores stalls which make the actual rate very much less.
==John

>>>>> "Gary" == Gary Morrison <mr88cet@texas.net> writes:

Gary> By the way, I just did some surfing around, and Netscape reported around
Gary> 1.8K per second. But those are bytes, not bits.