help

Welcome to EarthEar's first exploration of the world of on-line sound. If the many formats and players are also new to you, we hope this page will ease your initiation!

The River presents over an hour of world-class productions by 11 soundscape artists, each with his or her own individual perspective and creative style. It will be well worth your time to download one or more of these players, in order to share in the fruits of these sonic innovators.

We have created an optional interactive Flash animation show, which lets you hear brief excerpts from each piece, and create your own mix as you roll your mouse around the screen. It takes between 60 and 90 seconds to download on most 56k modems. If you encounter problems, you may either proceed with our non-Flash introduction, or visit the Flash/Shockwave site to download their free player. Downloading will take several minutes and require a simple installation.

Once you come to the Soundscapes page (which is either the Flash show, or the non-Flash list of participating artists), you can click on each artist's name to open a new window that features his or her piece, including a short artist statement and listening options. The page including the artist list remains open, and you can return there by clicking on its window.

We are pleased to offer you most of the pieces in three of the leading online music formats, each of which can be heard using free players available for download online.

When downloading any of these free players, the company will ask you for basic contact information. Be sure to watch for checkboxes that allow you to choose whether to receive information from the company or others. You do not have to end up on unwanted email lists; any info you need is always available from their web sites. It is usually possible to use the player without going through the online registration process after downloading, as well.

It generally takes several minutes to download a player (ranging from 5-15 minutes, depending on the player). Once downloaded, you are guided through a simple set-up procedure, and often routed to the home page of the company that you just downloaded it from. You may need to quit your browser in order to format it to play from your new player. In any case, once installed and ready to go, you'll likely need to re-enter the url for The River, so you might want to bookmark it now! (click here to open The River start page in a new window to bookmark it, then return to this window, which will remain open).

• RealAudio

  RealAudio lets you listen to a moderate quality "stream" of each piece. With a stream, the sounds never end up on your computer, taking up space. Rather, our web server sends the sounds to your computer, which plays them without saving them. A small file which only points to the proper web address remains on your computer. You can listen to RealAudio files while browsing other parts of The River site, or doing other work on your computer.

  We have used the leading-edge SureStream version of the RealAudio converter, which lets you hear the highest possible sound quality at your connection speed. It requires that you use one of the more recent RealAudio players: either a G2, or version 6, 7, or 8.

  To download the most recent RealAudio player, see:

  http://scopes.real.com/real/player/player.html?src=000919realhome_3,000919rpchoice_h1&dc=922921920

  For an introduction to RealPlayer (and a hard sell to buy the "plus" version rather than take the free one), see:

  http:/www.real.com

  [Top]

• MP3

  MP3 allows you to download high-quality music files to your hard drive. The trick MP3 mastered is learning to compress the file so that it is 1/8 its former size, without losing sound quality.

  Our full-quality MP3 downloads are for sale through the EarthEar Catalog shopping cart. Once downloading these files, they can be listened to at any time on your computer (hopefully, with good external speakers!), or, with the help of your MP3 player/converter (often not included in free versions of players), turned into audio CD files and burned to CD on your home burner.

  We also offer moderate quality MP3s as free downloads. These files also sound good, likely better than either the RealAudio streams or the free Liquid Audio streams (see below).

  Generally, you can set up your chosen MP3 player to be launched automatically when an MP3 is downloaded (when you first set up the player, it should ask you whether you want to make it your browser's default player; say "yes"). If you prefer, you can go into your browser's preferences panel and choose to have MP3s played in the browser itself by an appropriate Plug-in, for example, QuickTime. The simpler apporach for most new users is to allow the player to launched as a separate application.

  To find an MP3 player for a Macintosh computer, visit the following site:

  http://help.mp3.com/help/gettingstarted/sound/macintosh.html

  (note: QuickTime, included with the Macintosh operating system, can play MP3 files. If you're running a Mac, you might just try and see if it's already set up; if not, you'll need to go into the browser's preferences window and choose QuickTime as the player or plug in for .mp3 audio files).

  To find an MP3 player for a Windows computer, visit this site: http://reg.mp3.com/register?pitch=ctc_reg&origin=sound_txt

  For more information and help with listening to MP3s, see:

  http://help.mp3.com/help/

  [Top]

• LiquidAudio

  LiquidAudio is an alternative to MP3. It also offers compressed, high quality sound files, which are played on its own player. The Liquid Player also plays MP3s.

  Liquid combines the high-quality paid download option with a lower quality streaming preview option. You can load several tracks into the player, and then either preview or download them for purchase. Many CD players can be burned with tracks directly from the Liquid files.

  For more information about downloading the free Liquid Player, see:

  http://www.liquidaudio.com/downloads/index2.html

  [Top]

If you have any problems getting your system set to experience The River, please let us here at EarthEar know. We'll be glad to do what we can to get you up and running. We are a small operation, though, with no bank of tech support geeks ready to jump on it, so please be patient!

and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.