The current HotJava strategy for playing audio only deals with 8000hz, ULAW encoded, mono, audio streams. Its greatest short coming is the fact that it can't deal with low bandwidth connections. As a result you get very poor quality audio over slow links.
We are working on a better audio solution for HotJava. We will hopefully support formats like MPEG audio and CD quality stereo in future release.
Below you'll find a simple implementation of an audio stream that tries to deal with low bandwith using signal processing. What is happening is that the audio samples that are read from the internet are replicated in order to fill in any gaps that may occur due to low bandwith. The result can be rather funny!
To try it out click on one of the applets below. Click again to stop the audio.
Depending on effective bandwidth of your connection to the source of the
audio you will hear the audio being stretched, without affecting the
pitch, to increase the duration of the samples that are recieved.
This technique is not very effective on music, but it is quite effective
on voices.
In case you have a very good connection and the rate is always 100%.
Here are the same applets but they are slowed down artificially.
