About Joseph Rescigno
Images
Audio
Messages to the Maestro
About concertatore.com
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Technical information
(graphics & audio) -
images at this site
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encoding and summary of audio files at this site
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Site History
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Flash Animation
(opens in its own window)
Home
CONTACT
Technical Information
Site Management
We took pride in managing concertatore.com for over five years with “just Notepad and brains.” But once we got over 100 files we found it tough sledding. Worse, we knew we were postponing the implementation of new ideas. Losing control over the site, however, was scary. Ultimately, we settled on Macromedia’s Dreamweaver 4.0 and began to get serious with it in the summer of 2001. It comes bundled with Fireworks 4.0 and, well, things look promising. Your feedback is welcome.
Before we did that, though, we re-structured the message archives and installed the simple Google search form. We are considering other search strategies. Back to the top
Click here to send us a message.
Images
We have created simple graphics using Windows Paint and did most of our
serious editing with 
Paint
Shop Pro, version 5.01 by Jasc’s Software.
Macromedia’s Fireworks 4.0 came bundled with Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver used Fireworks to create the thumbnails necessary for the “Web Photo Albums” (both photographers, Avery and Brodzeller) and did a lot of the grunt-work of setting up all the files—but we did a fair amount of editing to make the pages do exactly what we wanted.
If you are using Netscape Navigator and are intrigued by the way that some of the individual images seem to come into focus slowly, we are using the LOWSRC attribute for the IMG tag. Rather than a low-resolution image, however, we are using a thumbnail and enlarging it with the height and width attributes of the IMG tag. Here is Netscape’s tag reference document. We are told that Internet Explorer ignors this attribute, however.
We have accumulated a lot of photographs over the years by multiple photographers. All photos are listed on the images page. As you click through, you will see the credits with each photo.
Animation
The LED sign on the audio page (the scrolling
banner with names of artists and composers) was made using GIF Construction
Set by 
Alchemy
Mindworks, which is a source of some pretty nifty shareware. Paint
Shop Pro came with Animation Shop 1.02
which we used to create the animation that cycles through most of the
images of the maestro on the images page. We
find both GIF Construction Set and Animation Shop useful depending on
the task at hand.
The Flash animation you can access from several different pages was created using Macromedia’s Flash MX, but we saved it back to Version 3 because the animation itself was so simple. It opens in its own window using HTML's very rudimentary TARGET attribute for the HREF tag.
Click here to send us a message.
Audio: Background Info and Player Downloads
You can get a free RealAudio® player at
RealAudio’s site. We tested these files using the RealPlayer Plus. (In
addition, for the record, we tested on a Pentium/233 with 64 MB RAM and
have not had an opportunity to test backward.) The Real folks tell us that
the audio quality is technically the same on both players but, sometimes,
some improvement can be achieved with RealPlayer Plus because there are
more options that affect the transmission. If you have difficulty or really
poor quality, therefore, you might consider upgrading. In the meantime,
choose the RealAudio download option rather than the RealAudio stream option.
Naturally, we would like to hear from you, too.
Note that some of the newer MPEG players will start streaming. As with the RealAudio, if the sound is bad, stop the streaming and download the file.
Our MPEG encoder and players come from 
Xing Technologies. We understand that our MP2 files are playable by
most MP3 players, but not quite all. We used Apple’s iTunes
to go back to the original PCM WAV files and convert to MP3. It is impossible
to test all players, though, so please let us know if you experience
difficulty: click here to send a message.
If you want to get into encoding, there is now a great deal more information around than there was in 1995. Since they are still active, we will credit those who where there when we got started:
Click here to send us a message.