Cutting Edge Web Audio

Rating:
Summary: *Not* a Comprehensive Treatise on Web Audio
Review: I'm sorry, but the surfer-dude quality of the prose in this book started to wear on me after a while. More importantly, and perhaps most devestatingly, the author confesses 400 pages in that he doesn't know HTML, and therefore can only give you the vaguest notion of how to actually put sound on the web.

A better title for this book would have been: "Hey, Let's Convert Sound Files So that Someone Could Put Them on the Web, If They Knew How!"

Rating:
Summary: Great book, we use it all the time....
Review: Not only is this a very helpful manual for the major wed audio plugins and programs, you will find that Ron is accessable and friendly. (he includes his email address in the book) Ron has changed the way we approach audio on the web and my company would not be as far ahead as we are today if I had not purchased this book. In fast I bought five copies and made it mandatory reading for all of my web designers. I can't wait for his next5 book in this rapidly evolving field.

Rating:
Summary: Great book, we use it all the time....
Review: Not only is this a very helpful manual for the major wed audio plugins and programs, you will find that Ron is accessable and friendly. (he includes his email address in the book) Ron has changed the way we approach audio on the web and my company would not be as far ahead as we are today if I had not purchased this book. In fast I bought five copies and made it mandatory reading for all of my web designers. I can't wait for his next5 book in this rapidly evolving field.

Rating:
Summary: The book to get!!!!
Review: Ron Simpson has written a great book for web audio information. Ron is an expert in the field and this book give a good overview of whats going on as well and detailed easy to understand directions and insights into the major web audio applications. If you use web audio you can use this book.

Rating:
Summary: Everything you need to know about Cutting Edge Web Audio
Review: Talk about comprehensive, I busted my butt for a year to put this book together and it's more than just a book about web audio. It also covers the latest Mac/Windows audio editing and recording software and the relevant plug-ins that will devastate your competitors and increase your popularity all in one shot. In the real world not everyone has the same needs or budget and I wanted to be sure to address as wide of an audience as was possible. Real Audio is great but then so is Shockwave Audio, QuickTime, Liquid Audio, Beatnik, streaming MPEG, and there's even more choices. Don't worry, they're all featured in this book.

Being a musician as well as an author I tailored "Cutting Edge Web Audio" to speak to not only the multimedia/web developer but also to those of you whose expertise runs more towards the area of sound and music. I felt it was equally important that all levels of audio expertise were addressed as well. The tutorials run the gambit from shareware on up to the more expensive and complicated applications. Whether you're a veteran or beginner there's something here for you.

The CD-ROM that comes along with this book is a very useful unit. There is demo software from a number of the manufacturers whose development tools just happen to be featured in the book's tutorials. Some of the tutorials can even be completed using nothing but the demo or evaluation software found on the CD-ROM. For those of you with limited software resources, the results of each tutorial step are also saved as both WAVE and System 7 Sound files. Simply follow any tutorial (in the book) and click the corresponding sound file on the WebAudio CD-ROM to hear the results, regardless of platform and application. There is a separate folder for each of the chapters tutorial files, making it pretty easy to find your way around.

As a bonus I've added (to the CD-ROM) a few music files from my personal music library as well as a few surprises from the CyberTunz music library (volume 1). All are available for the! use of the readers of "Cutting Edge Web Audio". With all the free stuff available on the WebAudio CD you've probably saved enough to easily cover the cost of the book. Such a deal.

Updates! To keep the book current I've created a support page that will have updates and supplementary material for each chapter. There is also news, web audio examples and links to all the manufacturers development tools featured in the book. This is all part of my plan to make sure the readers of "Cutting Edge Web Audio" create the best of the best.

Rating:
Summary: Completely comprehensive yet superbly accessable.
Review: This book is one of the nmost thorough treatises on audio software I have ever seen. The tutorials (at least some of them, that I can tell) are original not just excerpted from the manufacturers manuals and are detailed enough to be thorough yet easy to read and understand. If you're thinking about getting into audio software whether for the web or any other creative endeavor, this book is a must read.

Rating:
Summary: If you create audio for the web then get this book!
Review: This is an excellent collection of tips, techniques and resources for creating web based audio content. It introduced me to several new tools and options that I did not know about and is worth owning.

Rating:
Summary: A thorough, extremely helpful guide - the best I've found!
Review: This is BY FAR the most thorough book on web audio, and I have a half dozen on the shelf. This is also the only book I've found that covers recording voices at length - a topic far more applicable to those of us who create business-to-business web sites (most books only talk about music).

I e-mailed the author with some questions after reading one of the chapters, and he responded within 24 hours. He sent me his phone number and we talked for over an hour one day! You can't ask for a better resource.

The reviewer from Russia must not have read the same book I did - who cares about HTML? If you've bought this book, you already know how to create web pages. Smells like a hatchet job by some jealous competitor to me ........