A long time ago the company that makes Real products joined or was joined in temporary unholy union with another company that either was called or made Comet Cursor, which was a way to add enjoyment to web browsing by animating your cursor to suit where you went. A site about shoes might give you a cursor made of dancing little feet, say, or a science-fiction site might make your cursor a cute rocketship. Harmless, alleged fun.
    But the system also allowed the Comet Cursor people to collect information about what sites an individual user went to most on the web, so advertisers' robots could make informed decisions as to what sort of advertising that person would be likely to respond to best.
    Paranoids, wankers and aficionados of child pornography --as well as simply the easily alarmed-- became irate when this was noised abroad, as you can well imagine, though there's going to be advertising whether you like it or not, because there's money in it, and who cares if a robot knows you like to look at underwear and so you get underwear ads. (If you don't want to look at any banner ads, you can download free software that stops them from appearing. Do a search for ad blockers or banner blocking and try what seems attractive.)
    The RealMedia people and their products, like RealOne, have nothing to do with Comet Cursor anymore. But the stench of old sin remains hovering about the Real name, scaring quite a few customers away, and not just the paranoid wankers.
    My wife, no wanker, she, refused for years to allow Real products in her computer. I said, "Why?"  She said, "They're evil."  I said, "Evil?"  She said, "Look," and she took me to an anti-spyware website that informed us that years ago Real associated with Comet Cursor. I said, "Don't you want to listen to my radio show?" (We live in different radio markets.)  She said, "Not if I have to have RealAudio in my computer."  She's since changed her mind, but you get a picture of the quality of the objection.
    I dunno. We don't have the resources at KMFB to use several different streaming products at once. Real is the best. So...

    If you have an old version of RealPlayer, uninstall it (if you know how; otherwise don't bother) then download and install the latest RealPlayer (the current version is called Free Basic RealOne Player). It's free and basic.

    Go to www.real.com.  Look around in the page for Free RealOne Player. Click on that and go forward. Look around in the new page for Download Free RealOne Player Only. Click on that.

    You'll be guided through downloading (saving the install file to your hard disk). Note its name and where it goes (if you tell it where to go, like the desktop, say, you can't lose it), because later, after it's downloaded, you may have to go to it and double-click on it to install it... or the download process may end by asking you if you want to go ahead and install it now, click here, etc. Whichever, you're the culmination of millions of years of evolution; adapt.

    When the installation is happening, you'll be asked if you want a typical or custom installation. Typical is nice.

    The very last thing that happens is, you're asked to register by typing in your name and email address and etc. You don't have to.* The installation is finished at this point. Click cancel. RealOne pops up to demonstrate that it works, and that's it. Put it away and forget about it. It will sleep in the basement of your computer; you'll never know it's there. Then one day you'll click on a link to a streaming audio file and RealOne will lurch up into the living room and sing and dance for you.

    (*The penalty for not registering is that whenever you use the player you get a message reminding you to register, which you can cancel. It's a single extra step each time, that's all. The reason people who don't register things don't register things is to avoid having to give their email address to yet another organization that might spam them. One way to register software and avoid spam is to get a hotmail account for the purpose of having a good email address to give, where you don't have to deal with spam but once a month-- you go to your hotmail account, check the box that checks all and click delete. This is what I do and it seems to work. The web address of hotmail is www.hotmail.com.)
 

    A common complaint about RealPlayer (now RealOne) is, "I don't like the way the sound drops out! It's just playing along and it stops! This sucks!"

    Well, this dropping out doesn't happen so much to the fortunate few with broadband web access. If you have a conventional phone-line modem, as the overwhelming number of people who use the Internet still do, every streaming media product will stutter or fail entirely if you're listening/watching and trying to browse the web at the same time. That's because in most areas even a 56kbaud modem (shown flying, Photoshop-speed-blurred, across the box it came in) is capable of transferring data at less than 28kbaud, and it's often running at less than 20kbaud, regardless of the number your IP's connection window shows you; that's a best case number. So if what you're listening to --be it by Windows Media or Real Audio or one of the new streaming MP3 schemes-- is streaming at 24kbaud, there's not a lot of overhead for squeezing a web page with 300 total kilobytes (300 times 8 kilobits-- 2,400,000 bits) of images through the phone line into your computer before the streaming player's buffer runs out and the sound goes off while it buffs some more up for you. That's hardly the playing software's fault.
    If you like, you can download and install streaming media players other than RealPlayer (now RealOne) and compare them. I have. I like Real best, and most web radio stations that offer only one choice of streaming scheme do so because they like it too. They can use it to watch your pupils dilate when you look at underwear ads. Just kidding.
 

    Another common complaint is that streaming audio sound is not as good as listening to the regular radio. There are so many variables. Most radio stations webcast in multi-rate SureStream, which lets the listener's RealPlayer connect at the highest speed that seems to be working well at the time, and it's set to be backward compatible so even if you have RealPlayer Five, which is quite old, it'll work, and you end up with with the sound farting in and out between stereo and mono and the frequency response jumping from a tolerable 10 kilohertz monaural up to 13-point-something kilohertz and then down to 7.5 kilohertz or even lower, to where the music is still playing or the reporter's still talking but S sounds like F and cymbals sound like blowing out a candle. It drives you nuts. It bothers me because when I was little I had a lisp and finally in fifth grade a lovely speech therapist played back to me a recording of my reading, "Sally sells seashells down by the seashore," and I was horrified. I had no idea I sounded like that. She took a month or two of Wednesday afternoons teaching me to talk like a person, and all these years later it grates on my ears to hear some guy sounding like that on the radio. (Though I'm oddly thrilled to hear a woman radio announcer who lisps. Here in Mendocino County, one of the other radio stations, KZYX, has a thaffperthon with a thick, rich lisp like tearing a wet phone book, and she has to read things like, "KZYX and KZYZ now presents All Things Considered." And that's fine with me. I can't explain it.)

    While we work through the possibilities and growing pains of webcasting KMFB, I've chosen a single, unchanging streaming speed for a consistently decent sound quality for the greatest number of listeners. It's almost as good as FM radio sound. It's monaural, not stereophonic. There's a great deal to be said for monaural sound. Most recorded music, to the present day, even live-recorded music involving amplified instruments, is presented in fake stereo. The sound engineer decides where in the soundfield the electric guitar or sound-reinforced violin will appear to be, for example. Except in the very rare case of holophonic stereo, which is direct-to-final-product recording done using microphones in the ear-holes of an actual mannequin's head --the mannequin being placed in the audience of a live show-- stereo is no more realistic than monaural sound.

    Then there's this unnatural tone-control business. Have you got your graphic equalizer controls set in a deep U-shape? People who do that have no right to complain about the quality of any broadcast and/or recording. I'm sorry, but that's a fact. Doing that U-shape with the graphic equalizer controls means, in effect, you're constantly saying, "DUHHH," to any musician or audiophile who walks into your living room. Do you want to be saying that?

    I've heard all the arguments over stereo versus mono, but I think of it this way: which would you rather have, stereo with a frequency response of five or six kilohertz or monaural with a frequency response of ten or twelve kilohertz? Monaural, right? Good.

    Besides the frequency response issue, I've just always thought of stereo as a cheap gimmick. If it's good music, it's just as good through a monaural system. If music is lousy, it doesn't matter how many speakers there are, or what exotic plastic their woofer cones are made of. There could be 200 speakers in a big perfect ring around where you're sitting, each one playing a different part of the sound, and so what? If you move away from that spot by as much as six inches, the whole pseudo-effect is ruined. The electronics companies lied and lied to you about how if you bought all their fancy-shmancy stereo equipment the languid girl with breasts bigger than her head in the ad could shut her eyes and be fooled into thinking she was sitting in a concert hall when she's in your house, which she never was, by the way, not to mention she was nineteen in 1968 and now it's 2002; do the math and use your imagination. Even if you spend a million dollars on a stereo system, you'll notice the difference between a reproduction and the real thing instantly unless you're on drugs, and if drugs are the answer then what was the question; I forget.
    She was at the advertising photographer's house. So the real message of all advertisement was to buy an expensive camera.

    And then there are these --oh, God-- morons who put huge, expensive speakers and 800-watt amplifiers in their car, play that kind of music performed by a guitarist's vest-pocket Roland drum machine and a couple of other morons swearing and grunting into a guitarist's nive-volt flanger, and they turn the bass all the way up so you can hear them coming a mile away. VUMP VAVUMP! VUMP VAVUMP! FUGGIN' MUVVAFUGGIN VUMP VUMP VAVUMP! BITCH! HO! GO! BRO! FUGGA MUVVAFUGGA YO-YO! VUMP-VUMP! VUMP-VUMP!
    I always wonder why they don't just bolt four-way Nazi bullhorns on top of the cab and do their own barking and mushmouthed swearing for free, and reach around out the window to beat on the hood with a fungo bat for percussion. Maybe they just didn't think of it yet.
    Probably they didn't think of it because who could think, shut in a vehicle with something that's painfully loud from across the street? They could get the same subjective effect by rhythmically, vigorously slamming their cupped hands against their own ears, and no-one else would have to hear it. We could all have some peace.
    Can so-called rap music be an attempt to duplicate the mother's heartbeat and the monstrous, bellowed swearing and whining attendant on unwanted pregnancy? A subject for further discussion.