Here's some information and facts that will help you make this work for you. In order to hear the lecture, you will need a computer that is capable of playing sound. If your computer is a Macintosh, NeXT or Sun system, you may not need any additional hardware. The audio portion of our lectures are encoded using the RealAudio file format. RealAudio format is both a file format and a compression scheme used to reduce the size of a digital audio file prior to transmission over the Internet.
Digital audio is a binary representation of sound as samples per second.
Each sample represents an audio frequency value. As a reference point, the typical stereo music CD is digitized at 44,000 samples per second. At this rate, uncompressed digital audio represents about 5 megabytes of data for every 60 seconds of music. We have compressed each lecture as monaural audio to reduce file size and transmission time. You will be asked questions about your computer platform, processor and connection speed that can be answered by pull-down menus.