What Encoding Should I Use?
RealAudio allows for many different levels of encoding. In general,
the more information the encoding can use, the better quality of sound
you'll get. For users directly connected to a high-speed
(e.g. ethernet) network, selection is easy; when connected via a modem
(with PPP or SLIP, for instance), the selection is trickier.
How do the encodings relate?
Here's a list of frequently used encodings, ranked in ascending order
of good-playness (that is, the first one is the worst, the last one is
the best) -- in my opinion.
- RealAudio V5, 5kbps encoding
- RealAudio V2, "288" encoding
- RealAudio V5, 6.5kbps encoding
- RealAudio V5, 8.5kbps encoding
- RealAudio V3, "288" encoding
- RealAudio V5, 16kbps encoding
- RealAudio V3, "ISDN" encoding
- RealAudio V5, 32kbps encoding
Your Machine is Directly Connected
Pick the best encoding you can get. The only reason you might not
use RealAudio V5-32kbps is that either your RealPlayer is a version
less that 5.0, or network congestion is so bad that you need to "step
down" to a lower bandwidth.
Your Machine is Modem-Connected
Pick the best encoding you can get. You might try some of the
middle-range encodings, and discover that either the client complains
(that is, it just won't do that encoding), or the client stops to
rebuffer a lot (when it does this, it picks right back up where it
was, but a couple of these and you'll start to lose the sense of that
is what). Each set is a little different, so I've included as many
encodings as I can to give you maximum flexibility. Generally, pick
the best encoding you can get reliably.