About the Sound files from the MKB Music Studio

I've *finally* got some sounds in here. There are some formatting problems, which I'd like to discuss. Please let me know about your successes/failures with getting the MKB Music songs off these pages. Here's how I got my sound files to appear on my home pages and work on my Mac:

1. I played a cassette through my mastering deck, and put the stereo out RCA jacks from that unit through an adaptor to a mono 1/8" jack. I plugged that into my "MacRecorder" microphone's line input. That mic goes into the modem port of my dumb little Mac SE (68020 chip, 2.5Mb RAM, 40Mb hard drive), which runs the MacRecorder's software, "SoundEdit". This captures the sound at 22Khz mono, no compression. This software will capture at slower rates, and provides compression schemes. I'm not using them yet. Because SoundEdit stores the sound in RAM, and I only have 2.5M, I could only get about 63 seconds at a time. So, my three-minute-average pop songs take three or four passes to completely record. See below for more on this. I stored the resulting files on a 44Mb Syquest cartridge tape (removable memory system). I carried the tape to work the next day.
2. I transferred the SoundEdit files to my work machine (Mac IIfx, 20Mb RAM, 80Mb hard drive). I gave my SoundEdit machine 5Mb of RAM to work with, and loaded up the "pieces" of a given recording. I then "pasted" the pieces together into one long file, using SoundEdit's ability to look at extremely tiny durations of the waveform to determine where to splice the files together. I then saved these, using SoundEdit, in the "AIFF" format.
3. I used a Mac program called "Fetch" to transfer the resulting files to the WWW server machine (Orpheus). I then simply referenced them in html, like this:
   <a href=http://sdam.com/mkb_music/songs/audio/Piece.aiff>Piece of My Heart</a>
4. When I pointed MacMosaic at the html file containing that link, and chose it, it downloaded the file to my Mac, and launched the helper application "SoundMachine", which successfully played the sound.

1. I'm turning my carefully recorded compositions (complete with stereo effects) into 22KHz mono songs. This is not good. But, the stuff sounds surprisingly good on my little Mac speaker (no, no sound card or external speakers here...yet!). So, this is not a solution for distributing your music, but it certainly lets lots more people hear your compositions, and then they can get tapes by snail-mail, if they are interested.
2. I need to be able to capture the whole song at once, to avoid having to splice it all together. I either need to write a lot of one-minute songs, or get more RAM!
3. The resulting recordings are *not* small. The two songs I've done are 3.4 and 4.2 Mb. I like the idea of putting up small "samples", as well as the complete song, so someone can take a quick look at a lot of songs, then take the time to download the ones they like. I'll be doing a lot more of this. The hard part is to take a song that tells a story in three minutes ten, and convince someone that the story is worth taking a few minutes to download and hear completely, all with only a few moments of time to show it off.
4. I'm saving my files in the format "AIFF", because that's what the SoundEdit software I have supports. I see "audio MPEG" files on the IUMA pages, and "au" files almost everywhere else. It seems there is no standard. If there is one, I'd like to hear about it!
5. I've finally gotten a copy of SoundEdit 16, which allows me to save in "wave" format. Now I need to find out if I can get "wav" files to "au" and I'll be set...more on this soon.