THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, August 14, 1995 TAG: 9508130107
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: THE GATEWAY
EXPLORING THE COMPUTER WORLD
SOURCE: BY MARC DAVIS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 111 lines
YOU THOUGHT THE Warren Commisson report was fuzzy?
You haven't heard ``I Shot JFK,'' a 30-second snippet of rock music as heard through RealAudio on your home PC.
This bouncy little ditty, performed by a group called Black Velvet Flag, goes: ``I shot JFK. Pulled the trigger and blew him away. I shot JFK. Sorry, Jack, it had to be this way.''
Now, while the lyrics may be inane, they are, at least, legible here on the printed page.
Through your home PC speakers, however, and using RealAudio, the song sounds more like: ``I sjrt MBK. Pullll d tgger n blew m way.''
It's like trying to read the Warren Commission report via Oliver Stone. Something is lost in the translation.
This is RealAudio, a wonderful new bit of computer technology hyped by the trendy computer magazines. It is a piece of free software, easily downloadable on the World Wide Web, designed to make us all sit up and declare, ``Holy silicon! I didn't know a computer could do this!''
Well it can't. Not yet.
The concept is fabulous. Until now, the best multimedia PC couldn't overcome the Web's biggest drawback: It isn't really multimedia. There are pictures, of course, and some of them even move. Many are clickable. But they don't talk.
There's the rub. If you want to hear a Web site, you have to stop, download an audio file to your PC's hard drive, and wait. And wait. And wait.
So while there are plenty of sound bites out there - selections from the new Aerosmith CD, for example, or a snippet of Jim Carrey exclaiming ``Somebody stop me!'' - it takes a while to get them.
In the time it takes to download one song, you could drive to Planet Music, buy the cassette, drive home, take a shower, walk the dog and still have 15 minutes to read the sports section.
The thrill, of course, is inviting your friends to sit around the computer, tap their feet and await the inevitable, ``Wow! I didn't know a computer could do that!''
Sure it can. And so can your $35 cassette player.
In that tradition - the one that says it is a technological marvel that your $2,000 PC can show movies in a tiny corner of your screen, while your $200 VCR could do the same thing, and bigger - RealAudio was born.
With the RealAudio player, surfing the Web is now a truly multimedia experience. Audio clips can now play in real time - that is, as you view the Web page. No downloading.
This is what passes for trend-setting among the plugged-in crowd.
What's available? For starters, Progressive Networks, a Seattle company that created RealAudio, has put together an interesting lineup of audio providers. The best are National Public Radio and ABC News.
The theory here is that listeners can catch the shows they want when they want them, like programming your VCR to catch ``Home Improvement'' for viewing the next night.
But there's a catch.
The ABC news is not always new. It is not updated over the weekend or overnight. At 8 a.m. one morning, I heard ``news'' of Florida residents preparing for Hurricane Erin the night before. By then, the hurricane had landed and the entire world was seeing the results live on CNN and The Weather Channel. You could turn on a transistor radio and get later news.
On the flip side, NPR is a real catch for those who live by Nina Totenberg's reports from the Supreme Court. But there is no way to search the archive for past favorites - like Frank Deford's bombastic sports commentaries - so it's hit-or-miss.
And then there is the sound quality.
Last month, ComputerLife magazine compared RealAudio to ``a car's AM tuner when the car is far away from the station's transmitter.'' And it's not even that good. Over a 14.4 bps modem, it sounds more like a Fisher-Price cassette player with Junior bouncing it on his knee in the car's back seat.
It passable for news and talk shows. It's merciless on music.
One RealAudio site, for example, offers clips of live Rolling Stones concerts. But over RealAudio, it's hard to tell if that's Mick Jagger or Linda Ronstadt singing ``Tumbling Dice.''
To its credit, Progressive Networks knows it has a problem. Marketing director Maria Cantwell concedes that RealAudio isn't really ready for music. ``We think a future product will provide a better music listening environment,'' she said.
Soon, she says, better software and faster modems will catch up with the audience.
Meanwhile, RealAudio is real popular. Since April, 200,000 copies have been downloaded, even though the selection of 46 audio sites - most linked to RealAudio's home page (http://www.realaudio.com) - is still slim.
Besides NPR and ABC, some others include C-SPAN, The Moroccan Auditorium, The Canadian Broadcasting Co., The Happy Man (singing ``Hokey Pokey,'' ``Zippity Do Dah'' and other favorites), and Metaverse, which offers clips of commercial rock releases.
One site offers old-time radio shows, like a news broadcast from the 1937 Hindenburg explosion. The crackling sound you hear in the background isn't fire; it's just that old-time radio quality.
Thanks to new-fangled technology, that sound is back at a computer near you. MEMO: To download a free copy of RealAudio, point your Web browser at
http://www.realaudio.com.
If you have any ideas or comments for The Gateway, contact Tom Boyer
at boyer(AT)infi.net or call 446-2362.
In Hampton Roads, computer users can explore the Internet through the
Pilot Online. The best of the Gateway columns are available on the
Computer Page of the Pilot Online. See Page A2 for details.
ILLUSTRATION: Illustration
JOHN EARLE/Staff
by CNB