After trying for a month to find the "one true format" for audio, I discovered sadly that all of them have very real limits. Oh the demos of all the different schemes for pushing audio down the net sound wonderful. Wonderful that is if you observe all the fine print and have a machine of a specific type running a certain color modem through designer coordinated wires from a trendy net server to the last word in whang bar playback speakers... etc. etc. But if all you want to do is listen to the music in as simple a way as possible then you discover that reality isn't quite what it is made up to be.
In my testing, I found that I could make any of the formats work if I took the time to work out all the details. And I found that I could make any of the formats sound bad, though that didn't take as much work. It was like the tube vs. transistor wars or the battles over Ford vs. Chevy, or Steinway vs. Baldwin, or... you get the point.
So what is an audio site to do? My first though was to just go back to sleep, but eventually I'd wake up and the problem would still be there. There are not enough hours in the universe to try every combination of memory and system resources to list what will work for any given combination. I will have to leave that burden to someone else. I will be happy to answer questions as I can, and to list what people find works.
But to get things going, here is what I am trying for now. I'm putting up some Real Audio files. I have had good luck reading them on some machines. I am also putting up .WAV files and AIFF files. These are brief excerpts in not so glorious MONO 8 bit files. They download quickly and will give you an idea of what we do musically. For full length and fidelity, we are still using snail mail. I will be posting an order list for cassettes and CD's. If you like the sample, then please order the recording.