**** Welcome to phone, an interactive phone program for unix ****
 (C)1996 Carsten Gross <carsten@sol.wohnheim.uni-ulm.de>
 This program is free software, see main.c and COPYING for details

I think you know about the problem of so called interactive voice phone/talk
programs for the internet. Usually it is a program for unix or even windows. 
You can talk in your microphone, the program records your voice onto the
harddisk. After that you press the send button. Your opponent gets the audio
file via tcp and after the "get process" he is able to click on the play
button. Not very good, fast or interactive.

This program is a bit different: While you are talking, your voice is sampled
and transmitted. Your friend hears you while you're talking. Hey, great! And
he is able to interrupt you: if he presses the enter key, he switches his
computer to "transmit mode" and automatically your computer goes to receive
mode. And now you can hear everything he is doing, saying.... If you want
to interrupt him, you just have to hit your enter key - and suddendly he
has to listen to you while you are speaking again... and so on. 

Just a warning: This program really produces a lot of network traffic.
PLEASE use it only on a very fast network with a lot of bandwidth to waste. 
Even in "standard mode" (without commandline switches) your sample rate is
11250 1/s using 8 bits. This means about 10 network packets a second or
11,5 KByte/s (phone uses no compression at the moment). If you use maximum
quality (44,1 kHz samplerate, 16bit, stereo) your bandwith use is .. 180
KByte/s, this means about 150 ethernet network packets every SECOND. 

Included in this package is a binary for linux in ELF format. It should'nt
be a problem to do a 
$ make clean
$ make 
to recompile the package (under linux). 

Phone switches your microphone amplifier to maximum if you are transmitting,
and your volume back to maximum if you are receiving (and switches off the
microphone, so no feedback problem should appear). Assuming that a
microphone is correctly installed you can just enter:

$ phone -r <hostname of your friends computer>
and your friend:
$ phone -t <hostname of your computer>

After that you can hear your friend talking into the microphone (Your friend
gets first in transmit mode while you are receiving). If you hit the return
(enter) key, you can force your friend to listen to you. Do this as many
times as you want. The additional command line parameters are described in
the man page. They are just improving sound quality from "phone" to "cd" :)
(If your network link is fast enough).

The program is currently tested only with linux (version 2.0.2x). It should
be portable (after changing the soundcard stuff...) . 


Have fun with talking!

