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There have been a number of improvements in sound cards in the past several years.
Most sound cards today have a full set of features.
I still like the Creative Labs products but other companies have excellent products.
In the music area you of course need a recorder(editor) and a player.
Often these are not best served by the same application.
The complexity of sounds result in a high rate of digital sampling being required.
The result is a very large file if the older wave type files are used.
Some type of file compression is required.
The two best compression schemes seem to be Rich Music Format(RMF) and Real Audio(RA) format and more reciently the mp3 format.
Music is intellectual property.
As such it is left to the user of these products to give credit to the performing artist.
| Problems with Windows 2000 | |
|---|---|
| Media Player | Microsoft seems to have blundered here. While Internet Explorer 5.x seems to handle sounds well Netscape Navigator does not. |
| Crescendo | Neither Media Player 6.x or 7.1 nor Real Player 8 fixed my problem with Netscape 4.7. Crescendo version 5.0 proved to be just the plug-in I required. Crescendo. Restrictions are that it will not play WAV nor AU type files. |
| Sound Cards | |
|---|---|
| Creative Labs | Product specifications on full line of sound cards. |
| eBay Multimedia | Why pay list price? |
| Diamond Multimedia | Rio PMP300 is a portable, lightweight music player that stores up to 60 minutes of digital-quality music using MP3 compression. |
| Music, Rippers, and Recorders | |
|---|---|
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An excellent mp3 starting place. Lots of stuff here. This is the leading site for mp3 stuff ... Rippers, encoders and a whole lot more. In case you had not figured it out the music industry loathes this site. How To Do for mp3 |
| RealAudio | Superior audio and video at 28,800. A very fine digital audio player. Latest player is 5.0. Allows you to listen to music while you surf the net. |
| Cool Edit 2000 | Syntrillium's ground-breaking and award-winning shareware application Cool Edit 2000 replaces Cool Edit 96. |
| WinAmp Player | MPEG level 3 player. Very very good stuff!! |
| MusicBlvd | A source of CDs on the net. |
| News On MP3 | Some MP3 tools from the ZDNet Software Library. |
| Top 40 Songs | Don Steel's Internet Top 40 Countdown Show. Runs stereo nicely in background on a Pentium 166 @ 28,800. |
| Chuckie's Movie Midi Files | The BEST source of prerecorded music I have found! Bar none. |
| mp3 Utilities | Three good mp3 freebies. |
| Communication | |
|---|---|
| NetMeeting | Features let you communicate with both audio and video,collaborate on virtually any Windows-based application, exchange graphics on an electronic whiteboard, transfer files, use the text-based chat program, and much more. |
| Dwyco Software | Send and receive video, audio, and chat in real-time across the Internet. |
| VDOphone | This is the audio/video phone that won the PC Magazine Editor's Choice award. VDOPhone lets you SEE and hear anyone on the Internet (or on your intranet) on bandwidths as low as 14.4 Kbps and with no additional phone charges. |
| ICQ 99a Build 1701 | ICQ now features voice messaging. |
| Telephony | |
|---|---|
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Call ANYWHERE in the USA without leaving this page This is the best of the best in my judgement! |
| Direct Image | Talk to anyone, anywhere without incurring long distance charges. Lets you talk in real time over the Internet, even if you only have a 14.4k modem connection. This site has good information on sound cards and drivers for those cards. |
| VocalTec | A source for many telephony applications |
| Net2Phone | Something new from Yahoo and IDT. Looks very promising. |
| Phone Utilities | Here are more cool phone utilities (look for others in the sidebar): Caller ID and call redirection are included in these utilities. |
| Juke Box |
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