The Creation of RealAudio sound clips

This site makes extensive use of RealAudio sound. There are two types of RealAudio - streamed and downloaded

Streaming	With streamed RealAudio, as soon as you click on a RealAudio icon such as the browser will begin to play the audio stream straight away because the web server runs a real-time RealAudio Server. This is not yet implemented on the UKSMG site and also demands a good link to the server.
Downloading .ra files	The second type of RealAudio sound is based on down-loaded files. When you click on the icon then a file with a .ra extension is downloaded instead of the sound file being streamed. This is less convenient than streaming but is nice and easy to implement. (In IE select the play option rather the more usual save it option). This is what the UKSMG site currently uses.

RealAudio clients

Real audio clients for your Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer browser can be downloaded FREE OF CHARGE from the RealAudio web site. If you have not done this already then do it now.

It is important to use the latest browser versions so download v3 of Internet Explorer or v3 or Gold Navigator today - they are free!

RealAudio Encoding

If you have any recording that you would like to send us it is very easy to create .ra files that can be sent to us over the Internet. The procedure is as follows:

• Go to the RealAudio web site and download FREE OF CHARGE their RealAudio Personal Encoder. This is now version 3.0.
• Install it on your PC.
• Record the sound on your PC using a microphone plugged into your PC sound card using Windows' .wave sound format. You can use Windows' sound recorder for this. Make sure that you select the "11,000Hz, 8-bit, mono" recording option to create the smallest file size possible. If you don't you will end up files Mbytes long!
• Using a sound editor edit the recording to remove noises,and to keep it short, punchy, and content rich.
• Then, using the RealAudio encoder convert the .wav file to a .ra using to either: 28.8kbit/s for SSB or 14.4kbit/s for CW. Make sure to use v2.0 coding, NOT 3.0 or 4.0 at this time.
• .Make sure you enter the copyright data in the fields on the lower left-hand side of the encoder window.
• Please ensure that the file is less than 70k bytes in size and absolutely no more than 100k bytes oterwise it will not be usable over the Internet.

You can then mail these as an attachment to

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