Wondering about MP3s?

Some audio material is encoded in MP3 format. It's now the most widely-used format for compressed audio. It's generally less well suited to ultra-low bandwidth uses like streaming speech than other specially-designed compression formats like RealAudio, WindowsMedia, Speex, etc, but properly compressed it can come close, and its ubiquity can be a distinct advantage, especially compared to proprietary formats like RealAudio where it's basically impossible to transcode out of the RealAudio to something else.

To make a MP3 file stream (rather than download), the easiest way is to create a playlist (.m3u) file. This file is very small, it contains just these two lines:

#EXTM3U
http://www.tagnet.org/aim/sample.mp3

Modify the above to work for your files: create a new .m3u file for each .mp3 file you want to be streamable, put the full URL of the .mp3 file into the second line of the .m3u file, and then link to the .m3u file (not the .mp3 file) and it will stream automatically:
http://www.tagnet.org/aim/sample.m3u

For more information on compressing to MP3 format, see the Adobe Audition tutorial.

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