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Streaming Media - TrueSpeech

All Xenoplanet web accounts support TrueSpeech, an easy-to-use, high-performance streaming audio technology. Windows 95 and Windows NT include a TrueSpeech sound recorder and streaming TrueSpeech player. Follow these simple steps to add streaming audio to your web page:

Step 1: Create WAVes

Create PCM-encoded WAV files at an 8KHz sampling rate with 16-bit resolution, mono.

Any multimedia board which is SoundBlaster(tm) 16 compatible will support this format. To achieve the best quality, record with these settings. If your audio equipment does not support this format, use a conversion utility such as Cool Edit or SoundForge for converting to the necessary format.

Step 2: Convert to TrueSpeech

To convert PCM-encoded WAV files to TrueSpeech WAV files, use the Microsoft Sound System in Windows 95 or NT.

In Sound Recorder:

1. Select Open from the File menu. Select the desired WAV file, and click OK.
2. Select Save As from the File menu.
3. Click Change to display the Sound Selection dialog box.
4. Select DSP Group TrueSpeech(TM) from the Format list box, and cli ck OK.
5. Specify a new Filename, if desired, and click OK.
   
   

The new file is encoded in the TrueSpeech format with a compression rate of 15x.

Visit TrueSpeech for information on using TrueSpeech on Windows 3.1 or Macintosh.

Step 3: Create a Text File

Use a standard text editor such as Notepad, and create a .tsp file. The file should contain the following (case-sensitive) HTML line:

TSIP>>www.yourdomain.com/yourfile.wav

Note: The URL above should not include the "http://" characters. For example: TSIP>>www.xenoplanet.com/ourfile.wav would be appropriate, whereas TSIP>>http://www.xenoplanet.com/ourfile.wav would not be.

Upload the .tsp and .wav files to your account. Assuming you named the .wav file "yourfile.wav", the .tsp file should be named "yourfile.tsp", and should be located in the same directory. Make sure to upload the .wav file in binary mode and the .tsp file in ASCII mode.

Step 4: Link

Link the .tsp file to any image or text you specify on your page. When a visitor clicks on this link, the TrueSpeech player starts. Upon spawning the player, the TrueSpeech player reads the location of the TrueSpeech .wav file from the .tsp file. The player then accesses and plays the file as it is being downloaded, in real time.

You may wish to use one of these images on your site to indicate that your site takes advantage of TrueSpeech streaming audio: