Audio Players

Once you get a RealMedia or MP3 player, the easiest way to use it is to configure your web browser to launch the player when the download of a file ending in .rm or.mp3 is complete. You only have to do this configuration once, and from then on, the player will start automatically each time you select a record to play. If you don't know how to configure your browser to do this, please read the documentation or ask someone you know how to do it - I cannot provide technical support for all of the different web browsers.

For all operating systems and hardware:

The company RealNetworks makes two different RealMedia players: one is free, and the other has more features.

This web site is the home of MPEG.ORG, which has links to several MP3 players available for downloading, as well as lots of information about the MP3 standards. I use winamp on my system. The equivalent player for Macintosh is called macamp.

This web site contains a search engine to help you find MP3 audio players (and other software) for your operating system and hardware.

You can download free MP3 audio players for several different operating systems from this FTP site.

For Sun workstations that do not have sound cards (and most of them don't), use maplay_ulaw_sunos4_1_3 (this works on Solaris as well as Sun OS). Use the -amd flag to direct the output to the speaker in a format it can understand. None of my audio files are stereo, but if you want to play stereo MP3 files, you will also have to use either the -l or -r flag to play the left or right channel, since the speaker is a mono device.

For Macintosh:

Note to Macintosh users: I have been told that the latest version of Quicktime plays MP3 audio files.  Since this is the standard media player for the Mac, you may want to use it instead of a specialized MP3 player.

You can buy an MP3 audio player for Macintosh from Kauai Media for $25 using an on-line order form. They can deliver the product to you through e-mail if you like. I believe this product can play MP3 files interactively, rather than just decode them to .aiff files.

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