INTERNET BASED MUSIC: A LOOK AT PRESENT DAY TECHNOLOGY FOR THE DELIVERY OF MUSIC OVER THE WORLD WIDE WEB
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Note: This is a jointly authored paper that was published, citation information below. | |||
Ang, M. & Othman, A.T. (1996). “A Look at Current Technology for the Delivery of Music over the Internet”. National Conference for Research & Development in Computer Science (REDECS), 26-27 June 1996. Serdang: Universiti Pertanian Malaysia. Proceedings pp. 289-293. | |||
ABSTRACT A wide variety of music resources have long been available on the Internet but the full potential of online hypermedia as a delivery medium has only recently begun to be realized. The Internet is a heteregeneous-platform distributed system, while digital audio files are system dependent. Recent releases of the Netscape Navigator World Wide Web browser have included the Netscape Audio Player making it even simpler for the dominant PC-based public to playback digital audio files originating on Sun/NeXT or Mac computers. Quality sound files comprise a large amount of data and require audio compression to reduce the time required to transfer a file across the network. The mu-law file format, an international standard for compressing voice-quality audio, is used for Sun/NeXT “.au” file formats, the most commonly found digital audio file format on the Internet. While digital audio involves the actual digital representation of sound, Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) can be thought of as a set of instructions which tell a music synthesizer how to play a piece of music. A MIDI file is typically 1000 times smaller than a digital audio file of the same length, and is system independent. The quality of playback is however dependent on the client hardware and may vary wildly. Music files are conventionally downloaded over the Internet and playback requires the use of helper applications. A software player that can playback both digital audio and MIDI files is currently being developed in Canada. Presently, 2 different players are required, one for digital audio and another for MIDI. Real-time transfer of audio files has only recently been made available with Progressive Networks Real Audio client-server streaming system. Real Audio has only just begun to be used as a music playback standard with the release of Version 2.0 [10] providing FM quality music as opposed to the AM quality of previous versions. The NetSound project, built on the existing MIDI standard, is another attempt at real-time transfer of music over the Internet. The use of the architecture neutral Java language in programming for the Internet means that client machines need no longer be dependent on helper applications to playback various music file formats. |