Best Way To Make Recorded Voice Accessible To Public

[tjansen]

Hello, I am looking for some guidance. What is the simplest and most effective way to make a recorded book available to Thai people, particularly to non-readers. I have heard CD's suggested as well as downloads maybe from DTAC or another cellphone provider to people's cellphones

In the past I have downloaded and used a program called Audacity to make WAV files. Then I burnt them onto a CD, using, I believe, Nero. I just learned today that there are different types of CD's, including mp3 and audio CDs, and that an audio CD holds a lot less recorded material.

My goal is to have the recording available on CD as well as some easily down loadable medium. So, I would like to know the step-by-step approach to make this happen.

Thanks for any help.

Tom

[BB1950]

An audio CD would playback on all CD players, but would be more difficult to download and play.

MP3 files on a data CD would playback on most newer CD players.and would be far easier to download and play. MP3 has an advantage over WAV files because the file is compressed and smaller. To make a CD one would have to convert the WAV file using files to MP3 using anyone of many available audio converters. Then you could use one of the popular CD burners to create and burn an ISO image to CD.

The MP3 files could also be placed on a Data Stick, Flash Drive or Memory Card.

[Crushdepth]

Audacity is very good and if you already know how to use it then you've already solved the hard part. I suggest that you export your recordings as .mp3 files rather than .wav so that you can compress them and make them easy to download. You will need to install the LAME MP3 plugin for Audacity (I think instructions are included in the program, it only takes a few minutes).

You can then experiment with the bitrate (quality) that you encode your MP3s at. For *voice-only* audio files I've found that 64 KB/s is the best trade off between sound quality and file size. Then upload your audio files onto your website and create links to them (it could be as simple as a single HTML page, depending on what you want to do). Put your webpage + audio files on a CD you've solved that problem too.

You can also set up online streaming of your audio files quite easily. To do that, make a plain text file containing the URL of the audio file(s) you want to stream. Change the extension to .m3u (a playlist file) and link to *that* from your website. People's browsers will understand that they should hand off to a media player, which will then start playing the track while downloading it. You can include multiple tracks in a playlist, just put each URL on a separate line.

If you plan to do this sort of thing regularly you might be interested in setting up a podcast feed.

[tjansen]

OK, I have downloaded LAME and exported the project from Audacity as MP3 files. When I did that, the short (60 second or so) recording automatically divided up into five 11-second mp3 files. When I highlight all of them and right click on them, then play them in Winamp, they all play in sequence, and it sounds like my original recording.

Now, with Nero Street Smart, I don't know how to put the mp3 files onto a CD. I have tried a couple of (obviously wrong) things and got the following error message a couple of times.

Can you give some step-by-step instructions on how to get the files onto a blank CD, as well as what type of blank CD to buy?

ERROR MESSAGE

One or more files could not be added to a compilation.

It may be possible, that the files can be added, if a dedicated plug-in is installed.

C:\Documents and Settings\Acer\Desktop\Audacity\First Experiment with Lame_data\b00000.au

This message occurred for each file.

Thanks a lot

Tom

Audacity is very good and if you already know how to use it then you've already solved the hard part. I suggest that you export your recordings as .mp3 files rather than .wav so that you can compress them and make them easy to download. You will need to install the LAME MP3 plugin for Audacity (I think instructions are included in the program, it only takes a few minutes).

You can then experiment with the bitrate (quality) that you encode your MP3s at. For *voice-only* audio files I've found that 64 KB/s is the best trade off between sound quality and file size. Then upload your audio files onto your website and create links to them (it could be as simple as a single HTML page, depending on what you want to do). Put your webpage + audio files on a CD you've solved that problem too.

You can also set up online streaming of your audio files quite easily. To do that, make a plain text file containing the URL of the audio file(s) you want to stream. Change the extension to .m3u (a playlist file) and link to *that* from your website. People's browsers will understand that they should hand off to a media player, which will then start playing the track while downloading it. You can include multiple tracks in a playlist, just put each URL on a separate line.

If you plan to do this sort of thing regularly you might be interested in setting up a podcast feed.