Guest, Jon? Squiggs I presume. I am always a bit surprised by how much chatter there is on mudcat about how awful Paltalk is. I have probably the worst dial up connection in the US (downloads are at a whopping .7-1.2 Kbps/sec) and I have no problem with paltalk. When I ping, my reading is always poor, yet people tell me my sound quality is one of the best. I suspect your sound cards have as much to do with your experience as anything. Yes, Paltalk has plenty of annoyances - I got rid of the big one (pop-ups) by paying to use a service that works out to pennies a day for me. There are others. For instance I use the line in on my sound card and everytime I reboot, Pal resets itself to mic in and if I forget to change it I sing a whole song to myself. In truth, I must classify that as operator error as much as I wish the program was written such that I could control my input source. There are Pal help rooms, too. If you are having trouble, there are people there who will give you a hand.

The biggest problem of Paltalk compared to Hearme is that it is not quite so easy to shut out the rest of the world and limit the experience to 100% mudcat. On the other hand, I have met some really terrific people who have no idea what mudcat is, even getting together with a few to jam. One friend helped me tremendously guiding me through the process of producing my cd and even went so far as to do all the graphics, gratis. Yes, there is a world beyond mudcat. It doesn't have to be either or.

And Sandy, thanks for all the work you did putting those concerts together. They were always lots of fun, and I hope they will be again.

dw