AUDIO REPORTS AND HOW TO FIND THEM
Jerry Pournelle
Friday, December 15, 2000
There are two places to find audio and audio/visual reports.
http://byte.com/audio lists what's currently available from BYTE.COM people, including my broadcasts on Week In Review, while http://www.techweb.com shows a whole panoply of CMP/Techweb broadcasts.
http://www.techweb.com/today unsurprisingly gives a list of today's reports.
Broadcasts include the Week in Review. The http://byte.com/audio site has many back issues.
At http://byte.com/audio you will have a choice of RealAudio or mp3 files. If you rightclick on the RealAudio you get only a link.
In general, what happens when you right click on a Real Audio file anywhere on the web depends on the programming of the server that's sending the files. If they expect you to get it as streaming data, you'll only get a link. If you have a fast Internet connection this is the simple way to listen. However, BYTE.COM provides an alternative: If you rightclick on the mp3 file, you'll have the opportunity to download the entire file before listening to it. Those tend to be 4 -5 megabytes in length.
At the http://www.techweb.com/today site you will get a link to the Techweb server. This sends pictures as well as audio. I have found that I can actually listen to the audio on RealAudio with those although I some times have web congestion problems; for some reason they are smoother coming from that server than from some of the others. I have a 56K modem connection. It's usually but not always fast enough. We have recently changed the nature of the pictures, so that they download faster. There's also some "briefing chart" type text.
The mp3 files are, of course, pure audio without pictures at all. You can download those direct, or use GetRight (www.getright.com) to queue up several of them and download them in a batch. Once they're on your disk you can listen to them in a variety of ways including with RealAudio. You won't get the pictures and text cues, but you'll get precisely the same audio broadcast.
I'll update this page as necessary.
