Voice IRC typa thing - Intel's sweet Internet Party Line
Ron Elkayam
Check out http://www.intel.com/iaweb/ipl/index.htm for the coolest net
software I've seen in some time. It's called Internet Party Line and
it's a tiny (300K) freeware/experimental program that runs on any
PPP/SLIP account. The Intel Internet Party Line uses queued audio
technology to enable group conversations over the high-latency parts
of the Internet. It's is a Windows 3.x/95/NT application that was
designed for real-time, multi-party audio chat over the Internet.
Rather than mixing audio from multiple people (like TeleVox by Voxware
does - www.voxware.com), Internet Party Line queues each person's
statements and plays them serially, which should allow each person to
talk without interrupting the others. Like serial text chat lines,
you can see who is talking, because the name of the person talking is
highlighted as commentary is queued into the conversation.
The sound quality is superb even when playing music. But the really nice
thing about Iparty is that on top of the free client program, the server
program is also freely included and it allows anyone with a FAST
connection (ISDN or better, preferable) to become a global server. I've
seen people run temporary servers on university computers (T3) and it was
SWEET (over 10 participants w/o any problems). Incidentally, servers are
accessed by opening a URL in the form:
iparty://dynamic.or.static.ip.address/room_name.ipl
Now, the requirements listed on Intel's page aren't really correct,
according to people I've spoken to. Intel says "Windows 95 or NT
required", while it ran fine on Windows 3.1! Intel says "Pentium 60
required", while people with a measly 486/66 successfully run Iparty.
Intel says "28.8 required" while 14.4 users say it still works on their
system, albeit slower (...) My best suggestion is that you give it a try
for yourself:
1. download http://www.intel.com/iaweb/ipl/ipartyl.exe directly to c:\
2. c:
3. cd\
4. iparty -d The -d is important (to generate appropriate dir names)
5. cd\iparty
6. edit iparty.ini
change the sixth line into:
home_url=iparty://corn.elite.net/elite.ipl
7. edit c:\iparty\sessions\client.ipl
change the nickName string on the tenth line to whatever you want.
8. execute iparty.exe and connect to elite.ipl
If you don't find anyone at that chatroom, some other IPL
chatrooms on the same server are given at
http://www.a2znet.com/stuff/iparty.html such as:
iparty://corn.elite.net/default.ipl
iparty://corn.elite.net/bbs.ipl
iparty://corn.elite.net/merced.ipl
iparty://corn.elite.net/game1.ipl
iparty://corn.elite.net/elite.ipl
iparty://corn.elite.net/class1.ipl
Have fun, boys & girls, and let us all know how you like the cool proggie.
Ron
P.S. feel free to forward this message to anyone you think might enjoy
something like Iparty.