This CD-ROM requires the most recent Real Audio Player or an MPEG player to play the audio files on it. An ordinary audio CD can only hold about an hour of tape time, but this CD-ROM using the MPEG software can hold almost 30 hours. The MPEG software "compresses" the sound files (just like squeezing a sponge) so that many of them can fit on this CD-ROM. The only "trick" to this, however, is that you must have a "decompressing" software installed on your computer.

The good news is that the software is free, so if you don't have it, you can download a copy from the Internet. We have found that the free Windows Media Player available from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/search.asp? is quite good. There are also many other downloadable free players, and even the latest Real Media Player will play these mp3 files, but they do not sound quite as good as on some other players.