Remove Vocals from Mp3s using audacity (Win/Mac/Linux) Free

YouTube - Remove Vocals from Mp3s using Audacity

This is a great tutorial for removing vocal frm tracks. This is very useful when you just want that muzac playing.



Dan

VoiceThread

VoiceThread

This is a cool tool. You upload photos for a slideshow, then you can comment (audio or text) on each of the pictures. What's better, though, is that others can also comment.

Here is my sample (terrible production value, but I can work on that). It is a few pictures from a 4th of July parade. http://voicethread.com/view.php?b=5299&invite=4AbMIeWWvU.

I'd like to point out the URL above. You can share this slideshow with others, but it has to be make public to embed in a blog (external website). So, I created a friend (my other email) and "shared" the show with that friend. That led me to this URL. While I don't mind my presentation being public, I don't really want all users of that site to be dropping in and leaving messages. This would be particularly problematic if you were using this for a class. So, either get all of your students in your friends list, I do something like I described above so you can post a link to the content.

This could be a great tool to elicit iCBT-type test responses from your students, or other contributions of voice or text. While it does not work as a threaded discussion, you could have serial discussions through this medium, which is similar to what you get with most blog commenting features.

This might also be good for tutorials. Users could see a screenshot or other images and listen to or read the instructions/descriptions. I picture this as being good to use in one window with the software interface in another window (using audio puts less focus on the image, but it's there if they need it).

Dan

Discussing Media Literacy With Dan Rather | PBS

While this is not a revolutionary posting, the simple fact that a person who has been welcomed into people's homes for 40 years as a journalist is commenting so elegantly on media literacy is of particular note.

I really like the way that Rather explains the need for media literacy as an essential part of education. This is the type of story that you would expect from one of those old, professors who have seen it all and see what's old becoming new again.

Media (or Information) literacy is one of the solutions that I advocate for dealing with the "problems" of inappropriate activities in online spaces from chat to MySpace. Telling students not to use them will work as well as the "Just Say No" campaign of the 80's (the generation preached to during that time showed unprecedented increases in drug use in the mid-90's). Educating people (I'd include adults on this) about the problems that occur in public (virtual) spaces and ways that they can protect themselves prepares them to engage the spaces and not just hide from them.

What's your view on this?

Chinswing - Creating Conversations (A place to share, discuss and debate)

This is a interesting application. It is basically an audio discussion forum. It is linear, with the starting comment/question played first then all of the responses played linearly afterwards.

While I don't see this being good for our class, I think that it can be good for language classes. I saw a couple interesting uses already in action. One thread was a building story, one person starts then the next continues and so forth. Another way could be to record brief student presentations or opinion pieces or introduction and so forth.

Check it out for yourself.

PODZINGER

This is a great search engine for audio and video (save it for our search topic later). You may be saying, "how do we search through audio and video?" The answer is that technology is really cool.

The company states that they use voice recognition along with metadata (that's text information embedded in the files) to search. I'm suspecting that the metadata makes up for most of the search results, but I still liked what I found.

Try it out yourself.

Vaestro: The Dialogue Driven Network

I ran across this today via another site (see my previous posting). At first I thought that it was just another discussion forum, but it's a little more than that. It is an audio discussion forum. It's organized just like other threaded discussion forums you've likely used, but each entry is an audio segment.

I'm not a big fan of the design (particularly the player), but I'm not going to complain since this is a free application :)

Check out the test site that I started. Leave a message if you have the chance. http://www.vaestro.com/viewforum-382

Dan

Voicemail on your Blog

I added a little item to the blog today. I thought that it would be neat to test out. It is a voice comment system from a company called Mobasoft. The level at which I'm using it is free, but they do have other paid service options.

The name of the application for now is MyChingo (http://www.mychingo.com), but I have a feeling that the company is working on a replacement system called MobaTalk (http://www.mobatalk.com/). MyChingo allows users to leave audio messages on a Web page (blog). In my case, I have made these comments public. But you can choose to make them private so you are really the only person who will hear them. Might be a neat option for some activities that you run. Might be neat to work into a WebQuest if you are so inclined and it serves a purpose.

Give it a try if you have a microphone.

By the way, MobaTalk looks like it will be much cooler with audio, video, and text. Hopefully they'll make it so you can have sub-systems for individual posts. Now I'm just dreaming :)

Dan

MobaTalk Comment System

These types of systems are going to make blogs a lot more interesting in the near future. Just imagine enabling audio and video commenting on your blog. Yes, it will take you a lot longer to get through them, but how interesting would that be?

As more and more people have video on their computers (most new laptops come with video cameras pre-installed), we are going to have to think more about video applications in our instruction.

This system isn't out yet, but they do have a legacy audio version that I'm going to try out called MyChingo (http://www.mychingo.com)