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Throughout this article, you'll hear the term "media player,"
with several variations. Windows Media Player is, as the name suggests,
a media player. So is the RealAudio player. So what does the phrase mean?
Well, it's actually fairly self-explanatory: a media player is a program
that plays media.
What do we mean by "media?" Well, your VCR is a media
player of sorts, the media in its case being VHS tapes. The media for
a CD player is, of course, the CD. For a software media player, the media
can be several things. It can be a file that is stored on your computer's
hard drive. It can be a stream -- that is, a file that never fully
downloads onto your hard drive, but rather downloads incrementally as
it is being played over the Internet -- as a traditional radio station
"broadcasts" over the airwaves. Most radio stations on the Internet
stream their "signals" to your computer.
There are many different types of digital media. Hearing most
of them requires installing the two different media players mentioned
above -- RealAudio and Windows Media. The purpose of this guide is to
help you get up and running with these two programs.
 For
Windows 95 users only: if you really want to listen to streaming media,
you're pretty much going to need to have Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0
or later. A lot of sites just won't work properly if you have Netscape Navigator
4.x these days, and Netscape 6 has yet to catch on as a practical standard.
For now, it's best to have a good installation of Internet Explorer on your
machine.
If you aren't using Internet Explorer (or you aren't sure), it's easy
to get. Go to the Windows Update page (here).
This page should load very quickly if you're running Internet Explorer. If you
aren't, it will tell you where to go to get the browser, and will give you instructions
on how to download and install it. It isn't hard, but it can take some time:
be prepared to wait for as long as 2 hours -- sometimes longer, if you have
a slower connection to the Internet (it's a huge program).
For Windows 2000 users: If you are using Windows 2000 in a networked
environment such as an office or campus computer lab, you might not be able
to install many of these programs yourself. You might want to try contacting
your system administrator if you want to prepare your machine for Internet radio.
If it is already prepared, or if your administrator does it for you, then you
can skip to the "Listening to Internet Radio" portion of this guide.
For everyone else: The Windows
Update page a good site to visit frequently. Security updates and bug fixes
are posted here, so it's a good way to keep your system safe and secure. It's
also a good way to make sure that you're using the latest versions of programs
such as Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player.
Next page: Installing
the Windows Media Player and the RealAudio player
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