audio – Page 5 – 106 drop in

Levelling up to the LoDown

I made a quick recording in response to ds106zone LoDown 019. Scott played a section on ds106zone LoDown 020.
Recording made in garageband on iphone, I sent Scott the audio with the large room preset. This one is reset to dry so less echo.

As I say, I’ve missed ds106 for the last week, being away on holiday. Other than a couple of daily creates, I just kept up by listening to the lodown. This is sterling stuff, great fun, audio tips and ScottLo’s special sauce.

I was hoping to do some of the audio stuff this time round the ds106 but timeing was out. I might try and run a couple of ds106 bits of audio or go over some audio assignments. I do a fair bit of audio week to week, but not in the same zone as DS106. Last time round at Camp Magic MacGuffin I really enjoyed working on the group audio task which I didn’t expect given its subject matter.

I made the recording on GarageBand on my phone. Very straightforward. I’ve not used GarageBand much on iOs although I’ve used it a fair bit for podcasting on a mac and in very basic music making with pupils using the loops. One of the nice things about GB is that you can upload straight to Soundcloud. A disadvantage is the lack of MP3 export which is better for creating podcast episodes for maximum compatibility (pace firefox on the mac). This is a problem common to quite a few audio editors on iOs only a few export to mp3. I’ve tended to use audioboo for on the fly podcasting, some of the good things about audioboo include support mp3s, RSS and an API.

An extra audio tip

As my minds starts t owander as I type this post I remember an extra tip about audioboo.
One of the problems on embeding a boo into a blog to
like this:

listen to ‘The Real David Cameron on Neo-Liberalism and Education’ on Audioboo

Is that the mp3 does not get added as an enclose to your blog so cannot be listened to on a podcatcher on, say, a mobile device.

to do this you need to take an extra step.
First get the url of the audioboo page:
http://audioboo.fm/boos/1190812-the-real-david-cameron-on-neo-liberalism-and-education
and add a .mp3 extension to it:
http://audioboo.fm/boos/1190812-the-real-david-cameron-on-neo-liberalism-and-education.mp3
click on the add Media button in your wordpress editor (only wp afaik)

There click on the insert from url link and paste in the url of the mp3. insert that into the post: audio link added via add media
and wordpress will create an enclosure. Folk can now subscribe to your blog in a podcatcher, itunes, instacast on iOS etc and hear your boos.

Jim Says, Listen to the LoDown

Listened to a couple of the excellent ds106LoDown podcast on the scottlo radio blog this afternoon. I was delighted that a radio bumper of mine was plated as an example on ds106zone LoDown 009 apart from Scott’s usual wonderful voice and engaging content he is embedding some great audio information in the lodown podcasts.

So when I had 10 minutes waiting in my car I decided to knock up another bumper, this time playing with Scott’s reluctance to be a required part of the DS106zone.

jim-says

I used GarageBand on my phone, just messing with the sampler and then putting a hopefully suitable loop behind it.

Of course it would be better if I had a sense of rhythm;-)

gb1

5 Sound Stories a toy for #ds106

I’ve been working on a version of Alan Levine’s Five Card Flickr for audio rather than images. Very much a work in progress. Only tested on a mac (FF, Safari & chrome) and Windows 7 (IE9), no support for iOS (limitation of how iOS plays audio and my lack of knowhow).

5 Sound Stories

I’d appreciate any tests or playing around if anyone has a spare 5 minutes.

5 Sound Stories is a way to create short soundscapes and save them along with some texts. It was inspired by Five Card Flickr and the suggestion of pascale colonna, @colonna69, in a tweet or two.

The idea is to load a set of sounds, either from a list of keywords or at random and create a soundscape. The result can be embedded here is an example:

FreeSound

I am using the Freesound API which allows you to browse, search, and retrieve information about Freesound users, packs, and the sounds themselves

Freesound is a collaborative database of Creative Commons Licensed sounds. Browse, download and share sounds.

Freesound is pretty easy to use, I had a bash a while back with flickrSounds so had an idea of how to use it. Unfortunately my JavaScript skills are pretty limited so the code is a horror story at the moment. I am using jQuery to handle the requests to free sound and produce the players and interface. I suspect that there is some really neat way of doing this with object orientated coding, but I’ve just got a bunch of functions and placeholders on the webpage.

Saving to a Database

The other piece of coding I had to do was to save the generated soundscapes and associated information in some way. I’ve just copied this from Five Card Flickr. Alan supplies the source code and this is really easy to copy and alter as it is very well commented indeed. Since this is shared under the terms of the GNU General Public License I think that means I have to make the code of this available too. The JavaScript is easy enough to see (and wince at) in the browser, but it is part of my plan to finish this, clean up as much as possible and add some comments then share it.

Twitter Help

The web aplication still needs a lot of work, I’ve had some great feedback from Alan and Pascale Colonna (colonna69 on Twitter) over a few tweets.

Pascale came up with some ideas of how this could be used in primary school which I hope, with her permission, to add to the site and Alan has pushed me to refine the UI a bit.

Pascale also noted that this doesn’t play well on an iOS device. This is due to the lack of the ability to preload audio on iOS (I guess to save bandwidth) I think I’ve figured out a workaround but it is going to be a while before I get that together.

I’d love to get more help and suggestions either via twitter or in the comments here.

Learning by Doing and Riffing

This seems to fit my learning style, I’ve tried code academy , books, tutorials but none get me into the groove as much as trying something that is a bit to hard for me. Google is a great help, although for this sort of thing it always seems to end up on Stack Overflow. Working my way through a tutorial, I never run over time, miss what real people are saying to me. This is the power of learning #ds106 style, dive in and do.

wecodejam_econo

Of course one of the dangers of learning this way is a lack of rigour, no one is checking my work, there is a lot of sloppiness in my code, this is were dipping back into the likes of code academy helps. My Javascript is improving a little and my occasional visits to tutorials, learning sites etc is helped by having something to reflect on, hopefully, revisit and refactor.

The other real powerful thing about #ds106 is that participants are encouraged to borrow, copy, steal and riff off their fellow learners (with attribution). Here again I am riffing off @cogdog, Alan Levine.

This is not a MOOC, and I am not going to label it with anything in particular but learning with pals is powerful.

I hope this will make a useful assignment or two for DS106 and I’ll be submitting soon.

FlickrSounds Revisited

Or have a look by clicking this image:

Following on from my last post, I’ve paused in animating gifs when I started thinking of the sounds of gifs, this is not quite adding sounds to gifs but making image slide shows with sounds. Made with a new version of flickrSounds, very much in progress. The first version, produced a list of images and sounds, this one produces a slide show of images which play sounds. I’ve not really figured out a good interface for creation yet but have been enjoying stretching my baby steps JavaScript with a bit of json saving.

At the moment the toy just gives iframe code which might not play that nicely with some blogs. Easy enough to extract the url and link to it. If more than two folk use it I’d add a field for that.

The new version of flickrSounds saves a json description of the images and audio selected. The Show page loads this json pulls in the images and audio and produces a slide show. I’ve only tested in Safari, Firefox and Chrome on a mac.

As usual I am not sure how useful this is, Ben Rimes found it interesting but no one completed it as a ds106 Assignments: flickrSounds“>ds106 Assignment. The main thing is I had some fun.

Update

Thanks to a comment by Ben I’ve had a think about the images being of different sizes. Check Show and compare to this Show inside, the second is chosen by adding &l=t to the url.

Sounds Like a Train

Alan’s challenge

Step it up a notch and match your train gif to a song using http://gifsound.com

reminded me of flickrSounds, so I made a wee train quote with pictures and sound, much to my surprise I found a train for for this and train sounds for bound. Back to giffing soon.