Re: Hidden audio gem...

[Dan Strassberg <dan.strassberg@worldnet.att.net>]

At 07:40 PM 1/29/99 -0500, you wrote:
>I just dawned on me now.  The "sound" that most often eminates from my PC
>speakers is quickly becoming one of the FINEST mixes of music:  Netradio:
>altcountry on RealNetworks.

I listen to NetRadio's big-band jazz stream at work when I can connect. It's
often impossible to connect and the dropouts are very disconcerting (total
silence from as little as about 0.2 sec to several minutes; the longer
dropouts make you wonder whether you have to try to reconnect). The audio
quality of the (nominally) 16-kbps RealAudio 3.0 mono bitstream is also
marginal. Part of this is no doubt due to the poor quality of the laptop's
speakers. It's amazing that you can hear anything that resembles music from
speakers small enough to fit inside a laptop. But the few times I've
listened at home on somewhat better speakers, the quality certainly wasn't
wonderful. (No Win 95 here, and the latest version of the RealAudio player
that works on this Win 3.1 PC is 3.0--which makes connecting to NetRadio an
adventure all by itself.)

As for the music, it's _far_ better than that of any of the
satellite-delivered adult-standards services. The variety can be a bit
limited, however, just as it is with AM Only, Stardust, and NMOYL. The
absolute WORST feature is the liners, some of which are delivered by what
sounds to me like a white guy trying to sound Black. Two liners in
particular make me want to hurl the PC out a window (or maybe that just make
me want to hurl). One says, "they don't write 'em like that anymore, do
they?" and the other says, "that was a great one." YUCK!

As for the user interface, it's nice to be able to open a window that tells
you what's playing now and what the previous selection was, and also to have
links to a site where you can order CDs that contain the cut you just heard.
But NetRadio and RealAudio ought to get together on this feature. There's a
user-interface problem. The absolute easiest and fastest way to get to the
big-band stream is to open the RealAudio G2 player and select NetRadio
big-band from the Presets menu. If you do that, however, you bypass the
browser entirely and you never see the window that displays what's playing.
If you open the browser and get to the NetRadio site, which leads you to the
"what's playing" screen, you get cut off from the audio feed, and sometimes
it's not possible to reconnect for several hours.

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Dan Strassberg (Note: Address is CASE SENSITIVE!)
ALL _LOWER_ CASE!!!--> dan.strassberg@worldnet.att.net
(617) 558-4205; Fax (617) 928-4205

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