Click
Here
for more articles |
|
|
Increasing
sales by adding streaming audio to your
site for |
by:
Satyajeet
Hattangadi |
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
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
|
|
