Monday, August 21, 2000		Entertainment

Dancing to the Web's tune

If you ask a modern-day teenager about Vividh Bharti, chances are that she would think that it is the name of a Hindi-medium school or an organisation with a literary mission.

With the changing technology, the definition of music has also changed altogether.

Earlier, music and the frequency of the radio station were complementary. At present, music is formatted as .mp3, .rm, .ra, .wav. If it is music, it has to be on the Net.

Earlier the choice of music was limited as it was confined to medium and short wave, and the reach was regional only. Today, a person is not at the mercy of Radio Jockeys anymore. The Internet is gradually becoming a powerful medium for audio buffs.

Music on Internet can be classified into three major categories:

Online radio stations are like the normal radio stations from where music is relayed to the radio sets. The only difference is in case of a normal radio station one tunes in, where as in case of Internet radio stations one logs on. These online stations play songs to suit the taste of listeners.

Jazz, country music and pop - everything is on the Web. Even our very own All- India Radio can be accessed on http://198.138.80.7/cgi-bin/air.cgi.

On all these radio stations, one can listen to the live transmission. Wherever you are, if you are able to access the Net, then your favourite radio station is not far to seek.

Several radio stations are inbuilt in software like Real player, WinAmp, Microsoft and Media player (recent versions). All these are equipped with radio stations. For listening programmes on these radio stations, connect to the Net and click on any of these.. The good thing is that these provide non-stop music 24-hours a day.

Online radio on demand are similar to the online live radio stations,. These are those sites, which specialise in huge database of songs from all times and languages.

To listen to the song of choice, log on to the radio on demand site and select a song from the available list. Play it on the site itself. Normally, all these sites play music using the real player or the media player.

On clicking the specific song, a pop up window, either of a real player or the media player, opens up and starts playing the song. You can also listen to the radio on demand on phone. Log on to site of All-India Radio at http://air.kode.net/rd.html and dial up the specified number. Follow the instructions on the site and punch in the song of your choice represented by a number to enjoy the music. There are numerous other sites on Internet, which play radio on demand.

Use search engines, like www.infoseek.com, and www.lycos.com to search the site of your choice. If you want to search India specific sites, then write India in the search box and choose the option of search within the results. This will sort out sites related to India specific radio station and radio on demand. From the list, select the site that suits your taste and enter the site to play the music.

Music download is one of the most popular Internet usage among the Net surfers for downloading music from the Net. Majority of these songs are available on the Net free of cost and can be had from sites maintaining huge database of songs which also have links to the other sites having such songs.

Visit the site, choose the song and download. Provision of listening to the song before downloading also exists. There are many sites which offer free downloads Some of the good sites for downloading western music are www.mp3.com., www.peoplesound.com, and www.winamp.com., whereas for Indian music sites like www.India-station.com, and www.public-demand.com are popular.

For playing the music on the Net, special hardware is not required. A sound card with speakers attached, which is normally a part of standard PC now a days, is all that is needed. Normally the downloaded music files have the extension .ra, .rm, mp3 etc. For listening to the files .ra or .rm, one need the real player, which can be had from www.real.com.

Popular form of files that can be played by Real player are .wav, .mpg, .mpeg, and .au, besides mp3. The free real player is currently available with 3 band graphic equaliser. To fine tune the song, use WinAmp for playing MP3 files. This software has 10-band graphic equaliser and can create a song list to be played in sequence. This is not possible in a real player. For MP3 files, WinAmp players are popular. But by using these players, real audio or real video files cannot be played.