RealAudio: Hearing the Web for the First Time

It’s early 1995, and the web is a very quiet place. If you want to hear a sound file, you have to download the whole thing (usually a massive .wav or .au file), wait five minutes, and then open it in a separate player. But RealAudio has just changed the rules. It’s "streaming" audio.

The 14.4kbps Miracle

The most impressive thing about RealAudio is that it works over a standard 14.4kbps modem. The audio quality is… well, it’s like a scratchy AM radio station. But it’s live. You click a link, and three seconds later, you’re hearing a news broadcast from halfway across the world.

How It Works

RealAudio uses heavy, lossy compression designed specifically for the human voice. It also uses a clever buffering system to account for the "jitter" and lag of the early Internet. You need the RealAudio Player, which plugs into your Netscape browser.

<!-- Embedding a RealAudio stream -->
<embed src="http://example.com/live.ram" width="300" height="150">

The Birth of Internet Radio

We’re seeing the first "Internet Radio" stations appearing. ABC News and several local sports stations are already experimenting with it. It’s changing the web from a digital library into a live broadcast medium.

I’m currently setting up a RealAudio server for our internal tech talks. The quality isn't great, but the ability to listen while I’m working without waiting for a download is a revelation. I suspect we’ll eventually see video doing the same thing, though at these modem speeds, that feels like a long way off.