ABSTRACT
Internet audio is a relatively new commercial application area that has grown with the popularity of the Internet and the availability of low cost audio hardware for multimedia PCs. For the purposes of this chapter, we consider Internet audio as covering three distinct areas: multimedia conferencing, broadcast applications such as music-on-demand, and Internet telephony. In comparison to existing technologies, such as the Public Switched Telecommunication Network (PSTN), Internet audio has the advantage that it can be integrated with other media, it can be mixed to provide multiway conferencing, and audio compression can be performed in software (and easily updated as algorithms improve).
