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Increasing
Sales By Adding Streaming Audio to Your
Website
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by:
Satyajeet Hattangadi
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If
you have noticed, a lot of sites these days add streaming audio to
their sites.
Those ubiquitous buttons that resemble little orbs with the play symbol
on them? I'm sure you must have seen them.
A lot of marketers these days allow their site visitors to hear their
sales pitch, or perhaps a testimonial this way.
Before the advent of Macromedia Flash 6, the only way to stream audio
was using real audio player which required users to download their
bulky software, not to mention a web server that supported streaming.
The advantage of streaming audio is that visitors don't have to wait
for the whole sound file to download before they can listen to it. Thus
with streaming audio the playback is almost instantaneous.
Using flash 6 it is very easy to create these buttons that stream the
audio from your website to the users browser.
A great flash tutorial on how to make these buttons is available at
http://www.flashkit.com utorials/Audio/Flash_MX-Kenny_Be-824/index.php
Now the question is how do you record your voice and keep the file size
small enough?
If you were to make a recording of your voice with the "Windows Sound
Recorder" that was 60 seconds long and save it, it would be 1.26 mb
.wav in size.
But you can reduce this to only 117 kb if you made it a .mp3 file
instead. Here's how to do it.
Open sound Recorder by going to
Start/Programs/Accessories/Entertainment for (Windows 98)
Open sound Recorder by going to Start/Programs/Accessories/Multimedia
for (Windows 95)
Press the "Record button" to start the recorder.
As you're speaking into the microphone your sound recorder should have
a voice pattern.
After you're done press the "Stop button".
To hear your recording press the "Play button".
Next Click "File/Save As from the menu enter your file name and then
click the "Change button".
Another window opens up.
Here For "Format" click the "Drop down button" and select "MPEG
Layer-3".
For "Attributes" click the "Drop down button" and select
16 kBits/s, 12,000 Hz Mono 2KB/s.
Click OK.
Click Save and you see the conversion of the file to a .mp3
All done !!
Now all you have to do is pass this mp3 as the source to the flash file
and you have instant audio on your site.
About the Author
Satyajeet Hattangadi is the Owner of Novasoft Inc.
If you want to know more about how to add audio to your website, check
out our free ebook that has lots of resources and tips on recording,
software, free professional voice overs and also includes a set of free
flash buttons that you can use to stream audio at no cost.
http://www.novasoft-inc.com/ebook.asp
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