MP3: The Definitive Guide

Listening to MP3 Streams

MP3 files don’t have to be downloaded to your hard drive, necessarily. In many cases, you’ll be able to play them back in your favorite MP3 player directly from the server on which they’re located. As you’ll discover in Chapter 8, there are several ways in which MP3 webmasters can dish up files for “streaming.” As an end user, you won’t need to worry much about the particular streaming technique in use, though it’s interesting to know the difference. In some cases, you may have to tweak a few settings in your browser or player to make sure streamed files are handled by your operating system properly.

Types of Streaming

There are two primary ways in which MP3 files can be streamed to users without being downloaded: MP3-on-demand and MP3 broadcast.

MP3-on-demand

In this form of streaming, control of the download is in the hands of the MP3 player, rather than the browser. Because this capability is built into most MP3 players, users can choose at any time to listen to an MP3 file directly from a web server, without saving it to their hard drives first. Of course, this assumes that the user has sufficient bandwidth to listen to the file in real time without it skipping or halting, but we’ll get to bandwidth issues later. If you have a fast Internet connection, look around in your player’s menus for an option labeled something like “Open Location” or “Play URL” and enter the URL of any MP3 file on the web. The easiest way to get this information is to right-click ...