A-level Computing/AQA/Paper 2/Fundamentals of data representation/Streaming audio



 Gone are the days when you had to buy music on a wax cylinder, LP, tape, CD or MiniDisc. Nowadays if you want to get some music you can download it using a program such as iTunes or stream it using a website such as MySpace, YouTube, BBC iPlayer or Spotify.

The big difference between downloading audio and streaming it is that when you download something you generally have to acquire the whole file before you can play it, with streaming audio you play the file whilst you are downloading it. There are two types of streaming technology that you need to know, multi-cast and uni-cast.