SURFING THE HITS AT WEB RECORD STORE.

Byline: James Coates Chicago Tribune 

Just as the relatively simple technology known as radio came well before the miracles of television arrived, so the Internet of today boasts far more reliable - and useful - multimedia offerings focused on sound than on video.

And nothing shows both the power of on-line sound today and the potential for video tomorrow than ``tunes.com'' a frantically ambitious scheme by a Berkeley, Calif., record store owner named Kamran Mohsenin.

Tunes.com (http://www.tunes.com) is a record store without doors and one that is open around-the-clock with far more services to offer customers than mere physical record stores can offer.

On the other hand, shopping at Mohsenin's store on the World Wide Web means, among other things, that you miss the chance to meet fellow record store customers. This, of course, can be both a treat and an adventure in human diversity that no modem likely ever will bring.

But tunes.com, as the store-cum-Web site is known by a growing audience of net surfers, offers a nearly addicting garden of digital delights via modem for both casual visitors and serious shoppers.

The gimmick is the Internet technology called Real Audio or ``streaming audio,'' which is software that lets a visitor to a Web site have sounds that are stored on a host machine played in real time on the visitor's computer.

If you think that this sounds a lot like converting your $3,000 multimedia

personal computer into an $8 radio, you are absolutely correct, but there is more here than meets the eye, or the ear.

Storing audio on a server computer linked to the Internet puts a whole new face on radio now, just as it promises to change TV later on.

The Net brings the era of radio on demand. Never again will you need to wait for the clock to chug around to the ``eights'' to get weather or for Saturday morning to catch ``Car Talk'' on NPR.

Instead of waiting for some station manager's arbitrary broadcast time, you just fire up your Web browser and go to the radio station's home page where all the prerecorded programs are available for playing on demand by clicking on an icon.

The leading software for playing this sort of menued radio is Real Audio produced by Progressive Networks Inc. of Seattle, and the Internet already is brimming with sites using Real Audio to dish out high-quality digital sound.

Enter Mohsenin, chief executive of Surf Communications Inc., an Internet startup company, pioneering a scheme to not only let Web users page through a huge catalog of virtually every music CD on the market, but to hear samples from key cuts of each album.

Users encounter an opening page that lets them either browse through the various offerings by genre and instruments or to type in keywords to search the entire store for a given artist, album title, producer, etc. When you find an album you can click on many of the tracks and hear a 30-second snippet of the actual recording. You also get a photograph of the cover and a text file that covers the artists' biographies and discographies.

If you decide you want to buy a CD, the site allows for ordering by sending credit card information over a secure Internet link or by traditional fax or mail order. Mohsenin said that he now has 200,000 CDs in his system and boasted that he will have more than 1 million within a year.

To put the deal together, the startup company has signed deals with the six largest music producers in the country to allow duplicating the short takes and posting them on the Web where visitors can play them and even store them on their own machines. To produce the site, he said, the company acquires CDs in bulk and runs them through ``jukebox like machines'' that extract the second 30 seconds from each track on each disc.

``You can't go to any store anywhere and do what you can do on our site,'' said Mohsenin. ``You not only hear samples of what you're looking for, but you get the chance to browse through thousands of other cuts to hear similar stuff.

``If you're interested in folk you can pick a performer and a style and then search out all the other artists with similar styles and explore them too. You can even go to our `people area' and see what music various folk artists recommend.''

And while the tunes.com site operates on a business model that really hasn't been tried yet, dropping by is a pretty rewarding experience for Web surfers whether they are willing to buy their discs via this route or not. As promised by the site's creators, browsing tunes.com by category for similar artists, or even spending a couple of hours playing 30-second bites of a huge hodgepodge of players and sounds can prove downright addicting for those of us prone to Web-surfing.

Where else can you go for 30 seconds of Perry Como followed by a half-minute of Courtney Love, followed by 15 bars of Chopin all in 90 seconds of mouse clicking?