Welcome to SugarMegs Audio@Terrabyte Station!
http An .ra file (usually 5.5k mono) served by a Macintosh webserver. These files are listenable in realtime via a 28.8 modem. You can not skip around in the timeline, but can probably listen from behind a firewall.
ftp An .ra file (usually 5.5k mono) for download.
ftp stereo 16k A stereo 16k .ra file for download and outputting to tape.
ftp mpeg3 A stereo mpeg3 file for download and outputting to tape or cd. These files are slightly larger than a 16k stereo .ra equivelent
To transfer the music onto a tape, go out and buy a cable that has plugs like for you tape deck on one end (probably one red and one white RCA phono type plug) and a plug like the line or speaker OUTPUT on your computer sound card (probably a 1/8" stereo headphone plug like on a walkman headphones) on the other. Use this cable to hook the sound output from your computer to the line in on your tape deck. Now play the ra file or mpeg like you normally would, and make the tape on your tape deck.
To record onto a mini-disk, probably the simplest way is to follow the same directions as for a tape, but you'll probably have a different type of analog input connector type on your MD recorder. It is probably possible to go digital from your computer into your MD recorder if you have a digital sound card, a digital input on the MD, and the right cable, but we don't know this for sure. We don't have one so we don't know.
To record onto a CD
for your own use
(remember, selling CD's of this music is illegal, not to mention
a big kick in the balls to the bands who are kind enough to allow us to
record and trade such great music). This one's kind of complicated, and
since we are mostly interested in spreading the tunes via realaudio over
the internet, rather than becoming an on line tape trading warehouse, our
help in this area will be rather limited.
First, you need to have a CD writer (obviously). As far as I know, most
audio CD players can NOT read CD-RW disks, so make sure you record on to
a CD-R type disk. If you don't understand what this means, look at
Andy McFadden's CD-Recordable FAQ
Next, you need some software that can write and audio format CD on your specific type/brand of CD recorder. Different software packages can deal with different CD writers, and can do different types of writes. The CD-R FAQ mentioned above will help you decide what you need.
Most CD writing software that I know of (that would be 1 or 2 software packages :-) needs audio to be in either .aiff (macs) or .wav (PC) format to be written to an Audio format CD. So you need to convert from ra 2 wav format (Windows 95 only, mac users are out of luck here) or from MP3 to .wav or .aiff (winamp can convert to .wav, maybe macamp can convert to aiff??, there are others, check out www.mp3.com for links to these and more mp3 software).
Now convert to wav, fire up that CD writing software you searched out above, put in a blank CD and crank it out!
CD is a different story. If you are cutting an audio format CD (playable on a normal audio CD player), you've gotta have the music in a format that your mastering software expects. Usually this is Wave or Aiff format.
You can cut ra files or mpeg files directly to a DATA format CD, and play them off of the CD using your computer and the RealPlayer or WinAmp or whatever, but these are not playable on a standard Audio CD player.