If you want to hear music on PC, you need a SOUND PLAYER program. Which is available either on net or from various other shareware sources such as Chip CDs, PCQuest, Computer@home etc.

There are several multimedia sound players available now-a-days. Some of them are very popular among music lovers. Sound players application in computer runs with supporting Sound Card which is inserted in motherboard slot. So you must have sound Card installed in your computer. It costs around Rs  600- 1800. Yamaha and Creative Sound Cards are among the more expensive ones.

Once the sound card is in Place, you can download and install following Windows based Players through internet :

Windows Media Player : This application is in format of Microsoft streaming media file (asf, asx, isx), Video file(avi), Audio file(wav), Movie file(mpeg, mp2, mp2v, mpv, mpg), MP3 file (mp3,m3u), Midi file(mid, rmi, midi), Indeo video file(ivf), AIFF sound (aif, aifc, aiff) , AU sound
format(au, snd), Quick time file(mov, qt).
This is available on web at www.microsoft.com\mediaplayer\.

CD Player : This is a good program in Microsoft Windows to listen audio CD. There are options for continuous play, Random play and intro play. Sound Recorder: This is an application of Microsoft to do creative editing of recorded sound by providing effect of Mixing, file inserting, Echo adding etc. We can even change frequency and audio Bit at the time of recording or the existing recorded file. This is part of Windows 95/ 98.

Winamp ( MP3 Players) : This is Share ware program and very friendly with users. This application can be download from www.winamp.com. Continuous running music facility is available with set Preamp, frequency, Load list menu. Files supported are mp3,m3u, cda, s3m, pls, mid, cda, mod, wma, as and aip.
This is good utility to play audio CD and in above mentioned formats. This, however, has no option/facility to record audio CD in hard disk.

RealAudio Player : The installer for this player is called RA32_20.exe. Which can be downloaded from http://www.realaudio.com/.   It requires a  32 bit winsock to install, and execute the installer under Windows. It supports only  ra and rm extension files. If you want to control where and how RealAudio is installed, use Custom Setup.  The default installation location is C:\RAPLAYER\RAPLAYER.EXE. This needs around 2 mega bytes of free disk space.

Author's Choice :

Winamp ( MP3 Players) is most recommended as it is very popular. It has highest variety of music on the net. This has facility to play continuously one after another file.

RealAudio Player is popular because of very little space it occupies on your hard disk in terms of the main program as well as music files.

For any more information, please contact webmaster@udaipurplus.com
Contributed by : Sharad Mathur  smathur25@yahoo.com