Streaming multimedia content is gaining importance with broadband coming in a big way. With streaming, you can listen to sample music clips from the latest blockbusters. If you want them offline, then use Total Recorder. You can even encode it to MP3 and add it to your Winamp playlist. However, the bit rate for Real audio streams are often low (in the range of 20 kbps), and may also be mono to save on bandwidth. That’s because Real audio is optimized for streaming so it cuts out a lot of audio data from the original sound. So the final WAV or MP3 will also be of poor quality.

WAV to Streaming Real Audio

This is for you if you want to put streaming audio on your Website. Your source could be audio CDs, WAV files or MP3s. you’ll use Real Producer from RealNetworks, which allows you to do this. Just load the WAV and it generates the RA file for you. You’ll have to set the parameters according to the bandwidth you have for transmission.

There are a zillion other formats like the ATRAC3, A2B, and MPEG2-AAC that are not in vogue but may become popular as the needs grow.