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ESC!Webs Site of the Week Week of March 21, 1999 RealGuide Design: Real Networks If you've been surfing the web for a while, undoubtedly you will have heard of RealAudio. If not, here's a brief rundown: Real Networks, the company, created a standard a few years back by which you could listen to audio, both live and canned, through the Internet at a decent rate. It would, in most cases, come through your computer speakers at, what some would call, AM quality sound. In time, they developed better methods of delivering this audio to your computer and soon video. Since the inception of RealAudio, sound quality has grown to include stereo and FM quality broadcasts. Video, on the other hand, suffered from the low bandwidth typical in a home computer. Real Networks never gave up, however, and now have released a new version of their product simply known as RealPlayer G2. Many of the benefits of G2 are available because of the increased bandwidth available to home users, but much has come from the simply plugging away at the technology which Real Networks has done to literally streamline the data into one, small, easily transported signal. That's it in a nutshell folks. Get TV and Radio through your computer. The question always was, who is broadcasting this stuff?? Now there's an answer. RealGuide. From the same folks who brings you RealPlayer G2 (of course) comes an audio portal similar in feel to Yahoo!, which allows you to quickly and easily locate feeds of Audio and Video to download while surfing the web. The main categories include News, Music, Showbiz, Sports, Sci-Tech, Society/Culture, Money, Shopping and the rather curiously named "More". Browse through the categories and when you find something which interests you, click and let your G2 player open for you. Of course if you don't already have the RealPlayer G2 software you can download it right from the site as well. A new feature, which I just discovered tonight, is a small piece of software which you can download and turn on a RealGuide Explorer bar for your Internet Explorer ver. 5 browser. Right now I'm using RealPlayer and the RealGuide to listen to "Jerry Seinfeld on Men & Women" from ComedyRadio.net. The long and short of it? If you don't have RealPlayer G2, get it now! If you do already have it, then hop on over to RealGuide and burn some bits downloading!
Special Requirements: Must download RealPlayer G2 to enjoy RealAudio and RealVideo. Must be running Internet Explorer 5 for the RealGuide Explorer bar to work (optional). May run into conflicts with Microsoft Media Player if the Media Player RealAudio compatibility is loaded (I recommend you don't load this if installing IE5) Click Here to See Past ESC!Webs Sites of the Week These links will open up a new browser window on
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