From: info@radio.com (Automatic Response) Subject: FAQ on the Internet Multicasting Service FAQ for the Internet Multicasting Service ========================================= Tired of that last subtle twist in "alt.ascii.the-letter-a"? Do you find that com-priv has the information content of a free real estate seminar at your local Holiday Inn? Looking for an alternative? You've found it in this FAQ about the Internet Multicasting Service! What's an FAQ? An exchange of information cleverly patterned as a Socratic dialogue. Huh? What's a Socratic dialogue? A set of Frequently Asked Questions and their answers. Socrates was a famous philosopher in ancient Greece. So what's with the dead Greek and what does that have to do with cyberspace? Just in case you are intimidated by modern computer technology, we want to put you at ease. Compared to a dead Greek, we're *all* Unix experts. Enough! What *is* the Internet Multicasting Service? We're the first station in cyberspace, a source of news and information for the Internet community. We run two channels: Internet Talk Radio is a science and technology channel and the Internet Town Hall is devoted to public affairs. The Internet Multicasting Service is a non-profit corporation located in the National Press Building. We're right next to all the other members of the press, like the Kansas City Star and the Arkansas Gazette. They're not too sure exactly what we do, but as long as the rent gets paid they leave us alone. "Station in cyberspace"? Get real! No, really. We run a "radio" station, publishing sound files which you listen to on your personal computer. You know that funny sound your Mac makes when you start it up, quacking like a duck or talking like Bart Simpson? Think of our programs as a very long version of that duck. Gee, aren't the files big? Well, our programming is published in a sound format called Pulse Code Modulation, which is 8000 samples per second with each sample being 8 bits. Those 8 bits are encoded with mu- law encoding (which is a logarithmic encoding that fits 14 bits of information into 8 bits but you didn't want to know that). What this all means is that an hour of programming is 30 Megabytes. We'll typically publish anywhere from 30 minutes to 90 minutes of programming per day. Oh my! Do you mean to tell me that you expect me to download 45 megabytes of data? Are you nuts? Yes. Seriously, how do I get the files to my computer? The easiest way is to use your computer on the Internet. We put the files onto UUNET which acts as a main distribution point for large regional networks around the world, such as IIJ in Japan, NASA, EUnet in Europe, and many others. If you are a UUNET customer, you simply use anonymous ftp to ftp.uu.net. If you belong to some other network, you'll look for the files on your local file server. My regional server doesn't have the files. Is there some other way to find them? We maintain a list of known anonymous FTP sites around the world. There may be many others (do an Archie search on one of our file names and see if you recognize any of the servers). To get the known anonymous FTP sites list, send mail to: sites@radio.com What if I just found a new site which isn't on the list? Tell us about it! Send us mail at: sites-request@radio.com What if I'm not on the Internet. Can I get the files from CompuServe? Whew. That would be a bit tough! You're welcome to try and use an FTP to mail gateway, but this isn't something we'd want to do on our weekend. I'm on the Internet, but I dial into my interactive account on a 300 baud modem. Can I get the files? Sure. Just use Kermit, Xmodem, or something else. Of course, it will take approximately 222 hours to download a 1-hour program. What are you, a wise guy? I've got one of those whizbang fancy modems with 32bis and lots of features. How about that? That makes more sense. Is there a better way? Well, in the ideal world, your network manager on your neighborhood or corporate LAN sucks the files in every night and puts them on a file server on your local Ethernet. If you're connected at 10 million bits per second, a 30 megabyte file doesn't seem quite as bad. We realize this makes it tough on the home user, but eventually we'll all have ISDN, cable TV, or some other miracle giving us decent bandwidth into the home. Until then, the Internet Multicasting Service is trying to figure out what it means to be a cyberstation. You can't please all the people all of the time, but we hope to address the information needs of at least part of the Internet. OK, we've got the files. Now, how do I display them on my screen? This is radio. You don't. No, I mean how do you see them? Ah, you mean "do you publish transcripts?" The answer is no and the reason is that would increase our production costs dramatically. However, that doesn't mean that we think that ASCII is unimportant. A real cyberstation needs to employ all data types and multiple distribution techniques. For our "radio" metaphor, however, we just do audio files. How do I play the files on my Sun? If you are running SunOS 4.1.3 or later, simply pick the AudioTool from your OpenWindows menu. Or, use the "play" command. You can usually find that in /usr/demo/SOUND (or any other place your demo directory has been placed). You can play the files directly, or use a tool like Xmosaic or Gopher. How do I play the files on my NeXT? The Sun .au format is almost identical to the NeXT .snd format. Use your standard sound playing utilities. Can I convert the files to other formats? Sure. Use the famous SoX program, available for Unix and DOS platforms from ftp.cwi.nl. How do I play the files on Ultrix? AudioFile was developed by DEC's Cambridge Research Laboratory. Supports a variety of audio devices, a programming API and library, and some core and contributed applications. AudioFile is available for anonymous FTP from: crl.dec.com:/pub/DEC/AF/AF2R@.tar.Z How do I play the files on my PC? The source files are in the Sun .au format, which is almost identical to the PC .wav format. If you use SOX, you can easily convert the files to a .wav file and play them using any of your standard sound utilities. Another approach is to bring the native files straight down (no conversion) and use PLANY. This clever little program will handle pretty much any sound format on a Soundblaster card. The software is widely mirrored, but one source is: ftp.uga.edu:/msdos/mirror/sound/plany12.zip How do I play your files on the Macintosh? The native sound format for the Mac is the .aiff format. You can convert the files to .aiff format using a variety of tools. You can convert the file on a Unix machine using the SoX program. Or, you can do the same thing on your Mac using UUTool. UUTool is available in the /util/compression directory on the host mac.archive.umich.edu. The files are also mirrored in the following places: wuarchive.wustl.edu:mirrors/archive.umich.edu/mac, src.doc.ic.ac.uk:packages/mac/umich, archie.au:micros/mac/umich. To play the files, you can use AudioShop. AudioShop distributes a demo version of their program that can play .aiff files. Simply load the file and play it. AudioShop does not require System 7 so should work on most Macintosh systems. (Provided that you have enough disk space. ;-) The AudioShop Demo is available in the mac/sound/soundutil directory on mac.archive.umich.edu and is also mirrored. But I wanna play the file on my Mac in the native format with my existing Internet tools. How do I do that? You really want lots of things! OK ... you want a u-law playing program. Mac Mosaic and the latest Turbogopher all have the ability to call the u-law playing program. You can find the package in the usual places, such as: mac.archive.umich.edu: /mac/sound/soundutil/ulaw1.4.cpt.hqx Are there other ways to play the files? Sure! Do whatever you want! Lots of neat things you can do. For example, its simple to download the program to your MAC Powerbook or Sparcbook and put the computer on the seat next to you on the ride home. Expensive radio, but where else would you hear such great programming? Lots of other things have been done. One guy spools the data into the company voicemail system. Several corporations run little automatic radio stations, either using IP multicasting (check out isi.edu:/mbone/faq.txt) or at the Ethernet level (look for the radio and tuner programs on ftp.cwi.nl). I want to be a scholar. How do I learn more about sound? The ultimate source for Sound is the AudioFormats FAQ maintained by the good people at CWI in the Netherlands. You can find lots of good stuff in: ftp.cwi.nl:/pub/audio/ Why don't you publish the files in MAC format? How come you don't compress the files? Well, we could. But, think about this. In our first season, we published about 1.5 Gigabytes of files in four months. We think our steady-state rate is going to be about 300 Mbytes per week. If we publish in both the PCM and MAC formats, we would double (at least) the amount of data on the network. There is an old rule in networks which basically says that if you have to play with your data (e.g., fragment it), you should do so at the last possible hop. We want network managers to bring the files in and *then* do the conversions locally, publishing in whatever formats are appropriate for the next hop. If you have lots of MAC users, maybe you produce .aiff files. If you have lots of users using UUCP with 9600 bps modems, maybe you convert to GSM or some other low-volume format. Enough of this technical mumbo-jumbo. What can I hear? Our flagship show on Internet Talk Radio is "Geek of the Week" featuring in-depth interviews with members of the technical community. We've talked to all sorts of famous engineers about topics such as the next generation of TCP/IP, resource discovery protocols, network security, and how to put toasters on the Internet. Can I order audiocassettes of "Geek of the Week"? Of course. O'Reilly & Associates has issued their new ORAudio line of audiocassettes. Send mail to audio@ora.com and they'll tell you all about it. You can also get information from them through gopher space or through their whiz-bang, hypertext, multimedia magazine, the Global Network Navigator (info@gnn.com). Is "Geek of the Week" your only show? Au contraire. We also syndicate two radio shows from the public radio world. TechNation: Americans and Technology features great interviews by Dr. Moira Gunn, a former rocket scientist at NASA. SOUNDPRINT is an NPR show that features thoughtful looks at important topics. We also carry occasional specials. In October and November of 1993, for example, we're really pleased to carry "Hell's Bells: A Radio History of the Telephone." This series consists of 8 half-hour programs and is one of the best radio programs we've ever heard. What about the Internet Town Hall channel? We have our own broadcast booth in the National Press Club, joining C-SPAN and National Public Radio as the official licensees for the National Press Club Luncheon series. Speakers ranging from Miss Manners to Yassar Arafat to the Dalai Lama appear on this series. How do you pay for all this? We use a public radio-like model of short, tasteful acknowledgements for our underwriters. Underwriters? Don't you mean ads? Call them what you will. Are ads legal? You must be referring to the Appropriate Use Policy (AUP) on NSFNET or other networks. No problem! Turns out that the AUP is a rational thing and, since our radio shows feature informative, educational material, we fit right into the policies of government and research networks. Of course, Bart Simpson might not, but we're not a Fox affiliate. Yet. People actually pay to advertise on this? Don't be snide. We reach 100,000 people in 30 countries. If you're looking for a tasteful alternative to FooWorld, we actually have better demographics than most of the trade press! We've had quite good support so far. Sun Microsystems and O'Reilly & Associates started it off. (Thanks, guys!) UUNET Technologies and MFS Datanet are providing us with a 10 Mbps Internet feed. Beame & Whiteside provides us with TCP/IP software for our PC systems. Lots of other organizations are eager to support the first station in cyberspace. If you have excess money you want to dispose of, send mail to carl@radio.com. Are there any restrictions on what I can do with the files? Well, you can't take our ads out and put your own in and resell the files. We would not be pleased. Basically, we'll allow you to copy the files as many times as you want to as many people so long as: 1) money doesn't change hands; and 2) you don't alter the data. How do I get more information? To get this faq, send mail to: info@radio.com To subscribe to the announcements list, send mail to: announce-request@radio.com For a list of known FTP sites, send mail to: sites@radio.com To talk to a human, send mail to: questions@radio.com What else does the Internet Multicasting Service do? The radio station seems to be working out well, so we decided to work with Dr. Marshall T. Rose of Dover Beach Consulting to help start a new kind of telephone company. For more information, send mail to: tpc-faq@town.hall.org We also occasionally pull cheap stunts, like the time we linked up National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation: Science Friday to the Internet for an hour of live national radio. If you're on the announcements list, you'll hear about these special events as they occur. Can I start my own radio station? You bet! Next time you're in the National Press Building stop by for a tour. We'd be happy to show you our digital production facilities and studio and how we set up our 10 Mbps link into the Internet. Since we're a non-profit, we're encouraging anybody else to get into the brand new field of desktop broadcasting.