But there's a little more to it than that. In order to increase the liklihood that your songs will get heard over the internet, you need to make them stream. By that I mean that they need to be accessible in real time. The listener should not have to wait for a download to complete, and then open the song file in a player. People won't do this, unless they are downloading an MP3 file. And that's a different story.
As we discussed in the last two articles, MP3 files are big files. They take a long time to download- which means there must be a commitment on the part of the listener to put that particular song on his or her computer. What the typical musician wants is a relatively small file that a listener can easily access, just to hear the song. If the listener likes it, perhaps he or she will download an MP3 file, for a better sound. But the initial goal is to get the song heard. For that, we're talking Real Audio files.
Real Audio is the de facto standard so that is what I and most other musicians use. You can get the player and the decoder (to convert your song files from digital to real audio format) at http://www.real.com.
To begin with, you have to make another choice: real network streaming at many thousand dollars a month for a Real Audio server or http streaming (which is not as good but works pretty well) for nothing. For most of us, that's an easy one. I use the cheaper technique on all of the songs (80+ at last count) that are in Real Audio format on the Err Bear Music page (http://www.newsome.org/ebdirect.html). You can go there to check out the sound to see if the quality is sufficient for your purposes. Some of the songs there are mono, and some are stereo. The stereo files are bigger and take up more server space, but they sound a little better.
Here are simple step by step instructions for setting up http streaming of your songs on your website.
