Hear Philippa!

David (the wannabe nerd) writes:

Fear not, technophobes. This needn't be difficult (well not very, anyway).

First, I assume your computer has got a sound card or chip of some sort. If not, it's time to carry on looking at the rest of this site.

If you're running some flavour of Micro$oft Windoze (sic or rather sick), you'll be able to play straight WAV files. In fact, your browser will probably interject and play it for you when you click on the download below. The first download is a 10 second greeting from Philippa. The problem with straight WAV files is that they're big for even a few seconds of sound, so the second download is the same ten second greeting as a compressed WAV file. This gives superior quality (because its 16 bit sampled) but is only half the size of the first download. You should be able to play it if you've got Micro$oft Multimedia extensions (e.g. Video for Windows) installed and is standard with Windows 98.

The remaining two files are in MP3 format. These are very cleverly compressed to be less than a tenth of the size of the equivalent WAV file with neglible loss of audible quality. If you have Windoze 98, you've almost certainly got the CODECs installed to play them with Media Player. Otherwise, you'll need an MP3 player and at least a Pentium class PC. If you haven't experienced MP3 yet its worth the effort: there are masses of high quality music files out there to download. If you haven't got an MP3 player you could do worse than get

l

which is available for Windows 95/98/NT and Windows 3.1. Click on the screenshot above to download it.. The download is less than a megabyte and it's dead easy to install and use, although it lacks any jukebox type functions. Alternatively visit

where you'll find loads of MP3 software to choose from (provided you've got Win 95/98/NT) and stacks of MP3 music to download. The MP3 files on here all play OK under Windows 98 and Winplay3 under Windows 3.1.

There are two MP3 files here. The first is a spoken extended greeting from Philippa (just over half a minute), and the second is a recording of her duet with Ben Royston from The Gondoliers (she's the one with the high voice!). That's nearly half a megabyte to download, but for that you get two minutes of good quality (22 kHz mono) 16 bit sound. Unfortunately the original recording was a bit hissy, and although I've cleaned it up digitally, it's not quite Hi-Fi. Anyway, Philippa's voice would still sound great if it were recorded on an old wax cylinder, so it's well worth the download time which shouldn't be more than about 3 minutes when the Net isn't too busy. By the way, Philippa's pitch is OK - it's the orchestra that's not quite spot on.

To download a file, click on the appropriate link below. If you're presented with a dialogue box, choose the option to save to disk. Alternatively, right click on the link and choose Save Link As or Save Target As, then provide a filename.

E-mail David with technical problems or feedback at: david@dapc.globalnet.co.uk

E-mail Philippa if you like her singing at: philippa@dapc.globalnet.co.uk