Three Rivers Folklife Society Geek Page

The Audio Component

This field changes rapidly -
Audio venue last modified Saturday, 29-Apr-2000 08:14:09 PDT .
Please e-mail us your feedback and suggestions.

Your computer's sound system: You can listen to our performers' sound clips if your computer has a sound card plus speakers or headphones. The best quality sound is obtained with one of the recent-model "wavetable" sound cards, a pair of high-quality stereo speakers, and a subwoofer for improved bass. But whatever hardware you have installed will provide some listening pleasure. You also will need to have software that can play "mp3" sound files. Your computer may have come with that already installed. If not, we suggest some options below. Note that sound quality can be impacted if your system has insufficient RAM. If your system has minimal RAM, you may need to close other applications before listening to sound clips (or install more RAM, but that is another subject... ).

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Sound clips: Our sound clips are digital files recorded, with the artists' permission, from original CDs or tapes. Formerly, we offered sound clips encoded in the Windows "wav" format. In 1999, we began offering sound clips in "mp3" format, for better fidelity and smaller file sizes. For more details see our mp3 page. The sound clips are typically 40 to 60 seconds long. We try to keep file sizes manageable without losing too much sound quality. Still, sound files are relatively large compared to text files, and each of our mp3 files occupies about 400-600 kB of disk space. We find it can take 2 to 3 minutes, depending on how busy the server is, to download a sound clip using a 56K acoustic modem. Of course, if you have an ISDN line, a DSL line, or a cable modem, download time is likely to be much less.

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How to download sound clips: You initiate the download of a file by clicking on the highlighted link. The exact details of what happens next may depend on which operating system you are running. But it is likely the system will prompt you to either Save the file to disk for later listening or Open it for immediate playing, if that is an option. In the former case, you will be asked to specify a storage location on your hard drive. In the latter case, your system will write the file to a temporary cache folder, then try to start up your mp3 player immediately.

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Your options for listening to sound clips: If your computer has a software mp3 player already installed and tested, listening is easy. If not, you first need to download and install a player. (See see our mp3 page for some free options.) To continue, if you did not save the file, and just asked the system to play it upon receipt, that should now happen automatically. Or, if you saved the sound clip to your hard drive, you need to locate the file. In a Windows system, you can use Win/NT Explorer. Then double click on the file name, and the player should start up automatically. What? No luck? The following paragraph offers some hints.

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What if your mp3 player doesn't launch: Generally, when you install an mp3 player, the installation routine will specify that mp3 files are to be played by, or "associated with," that player. If that did not happen, you may need to tell the system yourself. In a Win 95/98 system, go to My_Computer / View /Options / File_Types, look in the window for "mpeg-3 audio," select it, click "Edit," and change the entries to specify the location of your player. If you do not find "mpeg-3 audio" listed in the window, you need to click the "New Type" button and add this information. For additional hints, you can use the "Edit" button to view (but don't change!) the entries for some other file types. You may need to use this same approach if you later install a different player and want the new player to become the default player for mp3. At this point your saved sound clips should play easily.

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What if you are not running Windows: If you are among the many fans of MacOS, Linux, BeOS, ... , some of the hints in the above section may not work with your system. We wish we could be experts in all these systems and provide exact directions for you. But we are folkies. (Remember?) If you have problems getting your mp3 player to launch, we hope our hints at least indicate a general direction that you can explore on your own. We are confident that you will succeed. Happy listening!

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