Audio: Squeezing Sound (page 2)

You see, there is still a place for audio on the Internet. The tools and tech are well established and integrated into applications you already use. While you may not need these techniques every day, it's nice to have them in your bag of tricks when the client calls. If your entire experience with compressed audio is telling iTunes to rip a CD for your music collection, you've got some experimenting to do. Try different bitrates and compression methods, and make your own evaluations. Give it a good squeeze.

Contributing Editor Hal Robertson is a digital media producer and technology consultant.

How many times have you visited a Web site, hoping to watch or listen to some media, only to find that you need to install some off-the-wall codec (and its bloated software bundle) for playback? The only codecs your browser should need are Flash, QuickTime, Shockwave and Windows Media. Let's face it, MP3 is the compressed audio standard, and it doesn't take anything special to play it in a browser. If you're going to the trouble of encoding audio for a Web site or download, make it easy on your listeners and use a standard format.

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