Issue 1: Audio Edition (beta)
Fancy a challenge as epic as the 1981 BBC radio dramatisation of Lord of the Rings?
It’s not long now until our first issue will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike licence, and one of the things we wanted to do was to make our content as accessible as possible.
In particular, we wanted to make audio recordings of whatever articles worked best when spoken months after publication. But this is a big task, so we thought, why not try asking the community?
All you need is a little time, a microphone and a copy of Audacity. Let us know in the comments which part(s) you’d like to record and let us know when they’re ready. Just record yourself speaking and export the file as Ogg Vorbis and/or MP3 (quality 4, variable bit rate, 80-120kbps are our settings). We’ve included Opus too, but we’re still not sure about demand for this great format.
We’ll record as much as we can (and we’ve already spent some time doing so – see below). But we’d also like to know whether you think this is worthwhile, and how best to present these recordings. Each feature seems to last around 25 minutes, so it’s good sense to make each available individually. But should we combine them all into a single file? Or tie them together with some RSS? Should we still include mp3, ogg and opus? Are we completely crazy?
UPDATE: If you’ve not got issue 01, email graham@linuxvoice.com and we’ll send you a link.
Here’s a list of what’s in the issue, and what’s already recorded:
- Welcome, News/Opinion, Letters, LUGS on tour, FOSDEM 2014mp3, ogg, opus 24:37 (recorded by Graham)
- Group Test: Encryptionmp3, ogg, opus 25:33 (recorded by Graham)
- 51 Greatest things about free software 2014An epic eight pages recorded by IanW. Thanks Ian!
- Interview: Florian Effenbergermp3, ogg, opus 12:02 (recorded by Graham)
- Feature: Bitcoinmp3, ogg, opus 25:55 (recorded by Graham)
- The story so farMike has said he’ll record this.
- FAQ: WaylandMike has said he’ll record this.
- Sysadmin
- Cloud Admin IanW is doing this. Thanks Ian!
- FOSSPicksCorbin is going to record this.
- Tutorial: PGP Daniel has done this. Thanks Daniel!
- Tutorial: BrewPi Mrmjburton is recording this one.
- Tutorial: OwnCloud EponymousMe is going to give this a try.
- Masterclass: FirefoxMr Mark Johnson has said he’ll record this.
- Tutorial: The Analytical Engine
- Masterclass: VIMAnd Mark Johnson did this as a free bonus. Thanks Mark!
- Tutorial: Arch Linux Stilvoid is going to record this one. Thanks Stilvoid!
- Coding: Build dynamic web pages
- Coding: EuclidStuart Langridge is going to try recording this one.
- Coding: Grep
- Thank you!
- Dev randomJoe Ressington has recorded this. Thanks Joe!
We’ve skipped over the news, distro updates, gaming and reviews as they’re a little out of date. Also, we think most of the tutorials won’t work particularly well when spoken, but if you disagree feel free to make a recording or let us know which you think may work.
Related Posts
About The Author
Graham Morrison
A free software advocate and writer since the late 1990s, Graham is a lapsed KDE contributor and author of the Meeq MIDI step sequencer. @degville on Twitter.
Go on then, I’ll do the Firefox one!
Thanks Mark – that’s fantastic.
Here you go! I decided to do the whole masterclass section as it seemed to make sense.
MP3: https://cloud.barrenfrozenwasteland.com/owncloud/public.php?service=files&t=fdc8b3cdda875c1a76730ecce9b4188c
OGG: https://cloud.barrenfrozenwasteland.com/owncloud/public.php?service=files&t=39d12c9b3866b96ff50d55315b2e4b18
I will do FossPicks, should be ready in a week
Awesome! Thanks Corbin!
Sorry, this will take a bit longer then I original thought, I’ve only done 4 foss picks so far
I’ll do the brewpi tutorial. I’ll keep you abreast of my progress.
That’s brilliant, thanks! It’s 8 pages so may be a challenge but we could always split it if you run out of time.
Excellent idea. You should record let’s say most popular posts and made them available via podcast manager. You should try to keep the count manageable for podcast. I will not mind ads to support you guys.
The tutorials could work as a video. Might take a bit longer to produce though.
i really like the idea, and if i can get hold of a decent enough microphone i would like to do the PGP tutorial.
I’ll let you know whether it will happen soon…
I’ll do “Coding: Euclid”; I think I can see a way of doing it without running into problems with reading code out loud.
Euclid article recorded; mp3 at http://kryogenix.org/random/lv001-euclid.mp3. I don’t know if this is suitable or not; it’d be worth having a listen and seeing if the “in the article there is a code block” approach is OK or invalidates the idea. NO worries if you conclude that code articles really _can’t_ be read out.
Thought: if crowdsourcing audio versions of LV is to become a thing, then a few more guidelines on how to introduce (epubs don’t have page numbers) and a thought on how the crowd should get a byline (“dictated by Fred Bloggs”?) might be useful?
Great work!
Thanks Stuart. I think it sounds great and referring to the article for the code works for me. The Euclid one is a good example, as there’s not too much code. The same could be said for Juliet’s Analytical Engine piece, but I think some code tutorials are just going to be too code-heavy.
We do need some proper guidelines, but we didn’t know how much interest there would be until we put this post up. Maybe removing the page number reference will be enough for listeners to simply find the article from the issue.
The only reason why I didn’t originally include a reader/narrator byline is because it was all in-house and sounded to self-referential, but I totally agree about having a byline for everyone else doing the reading. And everyone should get a huge shoutout when we pull it all together.
It’s great hearing a different voice with this stuff too, and I’m also finding myself digesting this material in a different way to the printed/digital versions.
Some thoughts on how you might distribute these recordings. This is intentionally maximalist, and I suspect you’ll look at this list and say, well, we can do half of that. 🙂
I’d have two separate sets of downloads; one which has each article individually downloadable, and one which has a whole issue as one big download, with articles separated by a chosen music sting and perhaps a ten-second “This is Linux Voice issue 005, with cover date January 2011″ intro in this larger file. Each of these things should have a podcast feed, and I’d make them available as both mp3 and ogg, which means having four feeds in total. (Six if you want opus, whatever that is — I need to read about that. :)) I think it ought to be reasonably possible, given a folder full of individual crowdsourced recordings, to put together all six of these feeds and the full-issue and individual article mp3 and ogg files with accurate metadata with a relatively simple script (which will minimise the time you have to spend).
It might be worth exploring the idea of not making issue N available on the feeds until issue N+1 has been fully crowdsourced. So, somebody says, hey, issue 2 is now released in CC epub and pdf, where’s the issue 2 audio version?” and you say, it won’t come out until all of issue 3’s articles are recorded. That gives people an incentive to help record.
Having both separate articles and whole issues available may also open up the door for interesting new ways of publishing; perhaps (assuming that there are about 15 recordable articles in each issue) the “one article at a time” feed publishes a new article every two days, so there’s a constant regular frequent drip-feed of LV audio, and the “whole issue at a time” feed publishes once a month as expected.
Also: reward for recording a segment: one free issue of the magazine.
There is a complicated coordination problem here (“I sent in my recording but someone else had already done it so I wasted my time and they got a free copy! Waaah!” vs “This person said they’d record article XYZ but then didn’t and so blocked anyone else from doing it! Waaah!”) but you’re all smart people, and you’re essentially solving the same problem that git is, then 😉
I can do OwnCloud but I am not sure of the quality of my microphone. I can do this and if it is not up to snuff I am happy to deffer to someone who can produce better quality audio
I’m happy to help with Cloud Admin. Give me a few days.
Ok here you go:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hgamkejsaehi3oz/linux_voice_issue1_cloudadmin.mp3?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/11igbihzy4hye6d/linux_voice_issue1_cloudadmin.ogg?dl=0
If you are thinking about some guidelines, then level (or loudness) should be included, especially if you expect the audience to listen to multiple clips consecutively. As something of an experiment I made mine to the new-ish EBU broadcast loudness of -23LUFS +/-1 LU (as used by UK Broadcasters), this means, very roughly, that the average loudness of the whole clip is 23dB below digital clipping. It is quite easy to measure using the command line version of ‘Ebumeter’ ( I hope it measures correctly!): http://kokkinizita.linuxaudio.org/linuxaudio/ebumeter-doc/quickguide.html. However, my clips are noticeably quieter than, for example, Graham’s clips which seem to be normalised around 9LU (dB) louder. This is quite significant so if you would like mine louder then let me know. Don’t forget to define the embedded metadata of the clips to keep them consistent between issues 🙂
Actually, having listened to a few other ‘talking articles’ my clips, although to a standard, are pretty quiet. So here are some louder ones:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mrd82w0z18kjkon/LV001_cloudadmin.mp3?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tfmo6th2y08ubzp/LV001_cloudadmin.ogg?dl=0
The idea seemed good at the time 🙂
Great work IanW, thanks!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6GnsABFAuTbeEp4RExFbE9CRjg/view?usp=sharing
I also sent you the link as a google hangout
I had a try at recording the pgp tutorial, but the audio quality isn’t great. (you can hear that for yourself in the test recording here) i don’t have much experience with audio editing, so do you have any idea what could be set better?
sorry, posting the link would have made sense: https://userpage.fu-berlin.de/danielro/pgp.ogg
Hi Daniel – sorry for taking so long to respond. I’ve only just got around to collating the various recordings so we can make a single audio issue post. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the words in your recording are going to be legible enough to use. The biggest problem is background noise, but there’s also some strong hum/feedback that takes over about 22 mins in. If you wanted to try a recording again (maybe for issue 2?), it would really help if you could make the recording in as quiet an environment as possible.
Thanks again for taking the trouble to make the recording! Graham
If I get some time over the next couple of days, I’ll have a go at the Arch Linux install tutorial.
Huge thanks to everyone who’s been in touch and either made recordings or who have said they’ll try making a recording. There’s only a few things left that might be feasible.
Also, sorry for not responding to the various messages today (Thursday). I needed to do some work and was a little out of the loop after putting the latest podcast online. I’ll listen to everything over the weekend and get in touch!
Thanks again!
So is it all done now Mr Graham.
Whatever the case. Glad i stopped by the site’s looking excellent 😉
I’ve just done [/dev/random] and [My Linux Setup – Philip Newborough] from the back page.
I’ve emailed flacs of them to Graham.
I’ve just realised that I should have said “Linux Voice issue 1, page 114” before I read it out. :/
It’s no problem. I’m uncertain about the value of saying that each time anyway, especially for the last page. Thanks for doing the recording!
Unless Nick Veitch wants to do Dev Random, which would probably be ideal, I can do it.
Never mind, I’ve just noticed Joe’s post. Sorry I got to it so late.
Looks like ’51 Greatest things about free software 2014′ is not covered yet. Unless anybody leaps in I’ll do this over the next few days
Here are the files, hope they are not too late! I did all of Mike’s ’51 things’ even though some of them are now rather out of date.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/pexpqltl358nkmv/LV001_51bestthingsaboutfreesoftware.mp3?dl=0
https://www.dropbox.com/s/v6scmylycgz5ohf/LV001_51bestthingsaboutfreesoftware.ogg?dl=0
They’re not too late, Ian. Thanks for recording them. We had a magazine deadline last week, which is why everything went a little quiet., but I’ll try and put all this together this week and perhaps try and make a couple of other recordings depending on what needs to be done.
Ill do the analytical engine. I’m only using a cheap headset and a laptop. I hope its usable.
I *finally* got around to finishing the recording I started right after I offered to do the Arch Linux article.
Anyway, here it is – leech away and provide however and under whatever license you like 🙂
http://offend.me.uk/media/LV001-Arch.mp3
http://offend.me.uk/media/LV001-Arch.ogg
http://offend.me.uk/media/LV001-Arch.opus
Are you doing this for other issues? I’m willing to help. If you need help create audio versions of the articles, let me know.
I would love to help out with the effort. Which articles are still available to be recorded?