Let’s say that a technically savvy educator wanted to record his lectures and class discussions as MP3 files using a digital voice recorder. He then wanted to upload those files to a place where students (using only a browser) could play them over their computer speakers. The files on the web site would list the date and time of the upload. The web site should be password protected (maybe a single ID and Password for the whole class).
Is their something “off-the-shelf” that could be used to do this? If not, is their something that gets close but would require some modification? Perhaps a Wordpress template or something? The educator is not opposed to installing software on a web server and doing some programming.
I’m interested in this question as well – as far as my limited knowledge indicates to me, a private, self-administered server is the way I would go. How about a Facebook-type interface wherein only “friends” or whatever can access the material?
Just straight to YouTube – if it’s not potentially abusable material, the search function alone should limit in practical terms the access to obscure information.
Well this MP3 size calculator says that an hour long lecture, recorded at 128kbs (which is way overkill for audio) is about 56 Meg.
I’d like to add to my original post… Let’s say we didn’t want to leverage any external services (like esnip), but we wanted to host the information ourselves.
Is there a web template of some sort that will read audio files from a directory on a server and let you play all of them? I know that Flowplayer is a popular media player, and their is a WordPress Flowplayer widget. Can that be leveraged somehow?
You could always include a link to something like this on the off chance that they have a computer from 1994 that doesn’t have an MP3 player on it already.
To answer the OP’s question, yes, there are such things available… depending on which platform you use (Wordpress, Moodle, plain HTML) there are probably different solutions available.
The best option, IMO, is to provide a Flash player for every lecture along with an MP3 download link; that way people can play it on any computer without worrying about incompatibilities or software or download policies (especially at school) but they can still manually download it if they want to. For Wordpress, as an example, there’s the aptly-named “folder full of mp3s” plugin and other similar ones.
You also don’t need to encode voice lectures at 128 kbps.
If you don’t mind hosted services, Youtube may actually be the best place for this. They have the bandwidth and speed available and disk space shouldn’t be an issue. It’s free. It’ll let you make the videos “unlisted” so that only people with the URL can see it. It could even transcribe your lectures into captions with automatic speech recognition. It plays on everything from computers to iPhones and Android phones. You can just use a static background for the video part.
Couldn’t this technically savvy educator record the lectures on video instead of audio? Audio only loses anything that was written on the blackboard (or whiteboard, as most of them are these days). Put the videos on a web page somewhere with a format that Windows Media understands and also maybe a copy in quicktime or some such for the Apple folks.
I think the best option would be just setting up a podcast for the class- lots of tutorials around the web. If you just give the MP3s names with dates and don’t put a lot of identifying information with the podcast and just give the web address of the podcast to the students, you wouldn’t need to password protect. People don’t tend to listen (or search for) things labeled Lecture-100816.mp3
Your school should have a place to host the podcast easily.
I am really surprised people don’t use or know about podcasts and RSS feeds. They are very useful tools.
You could use AAC-HE and lower the bit rate to 32 and probably get by with 16kbs
There’s no need to include a player as you can easily download and choose your own player. I can’t think of any library or internet cafe that wouldn’t already have a player on it. AAC (mp4’s) is common enough now.
All you have to do is upload the file as a link and let the user computer handle it. Then they could play it or do “save link as” and save it to the computer and transfer it to a iPod or other mp3 player.
OK, here’s more background to help answer some of the questions…
I had an educator approach me and basically say that they want to post audio files for their students. Why audio and not video? It’s a lot easier to use a digital voice recorder than it is to futz with a camera, and his is an AP class that’s focused on discussion vs. writing on the blackboard/whiteboard. He currently uses a digital recorder to record the class and discussion (for absent students, for students to review, etc.), but he has to deal with emailing the files to students, archiving recordings, etc.
The educator said that some teachers created podcasts from their files, but that was a mini-hassle to do, and then students couldn’t just play the files from a browser.
He would like to scale this to other educators in his school district.
Does the website have to have an embedded player? No, it doesn’t have to. To me the advantages of an embedded player are less support/issues, and students don’t have to download the whole file to start playing it, but I guess an embedded player isn’t necessary.
Reply - I haven’t looked at it too deeply, but I like the idea of the “Folder Full of MP3’s” scenario. The corollary question is whether there’s a WordPress plugin that let’s you upload the MP3’s to a particular directory.
I don’t do anything like your OP, so I can’t give you suggestions for that. But this sentence caught my eye:
If you are going to use 1 ID & PWD for the whole class, it’s going to get out to non-members. Why does it need to be password protected? What’s it being protected from? If there is nothing bad anyone can do with it, don’t protect it. If there is something bad someone could do with it, you are going to need a lot better protection than that. Unless we know what you are trying to protect it from, we can’t give you any useful suggestions on what sort of protection you will want to use.
On another point, other posters have mentioned the kbps rates to use for MP3s. Telephone quality, which I presume would be sufficient, requires 24kbps. Add kbps from there as needed for your desired quality, or the minimum your recording software will give, whichever is higher. I’m guessing that 24 is about the minimum that is likely to be satisfactory, just based on my experience/experiments with digital voice intelligeblility at low bit-rates. 16kbps will probably start slurring “s” to “sh”, and other such unpleasantness.
I’m confused by all the talk I see about “players” in this thread.
What if I create a simple HTML web page, with a link to a .MP3 file for each lecture. Something like this:
The student clicks on the link, the MP3 player plug-in for the browser plays the .MP3 file. Voilà. Surely no student nowadays will be using a computer with no .MP3 player plug-in. If necessary, include links to where you can find an .MP3 player plug-in for your browser/operating system.
Probably. Search around. If he’s sure he’s going to stick with Wordpress and he can’t find a plugin himself, let us know.
For one thing, it’s complicated to set it up so that the lectures will stream (you have to manually make a .m3u playlist); if you don’t do that, users have to download the whole MP3 being before able to listen… or, I think your host has to correctly set MIME types, which gets even more complex. At worst, that could render the lectures unlistenable on computers that prohibit downloads; at best, it’s still an unnecessary hassle.
Additionally, MP3 files are usually played by the QuickTime or Windows Media Player plugins, both of which can occasionally have problems with Firefox and maybe other browsers. They’ll work 90% of the time, but in my experience it’s still not as hassle-free as a Flash player.
Lastly, as ridiculous as it sounds, some codecs and players have trouble decoding MP3s of non-standard bitrates (such as 32kbps mono, or more commonly, variable bitrate). Flash, meanwhile, is a great compatibility equalizer on any platform that supports it.
And that’s the reason why Flash Video took off, and Quicktime/Media Player video didn’t (except in certain situations), even though both would run on slower computers.
It’s also the reason I’m hesitant to believe that HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags will take off. They actually more heavily restrict the type of video or audio you are allowed to use.
I definitely suggest downloading a Flash MP3 player (there are free ones), and then following the instructions to embed it on a page, and including a link to the MP3 file for those who want to download it.
As for password protection–C.H. is right, but it wouldn’t hurt to password protect the files, and then change the password and filenames (which should be random) every semester. Sure, the password will get out, but the damage is minimal. Just having a password creates this idea that the files are exclusive to the class.
Unless, of course, there really is a reason you don’t want other students to listen to your lectures for free, like maybe school policy or something.(It’s not like they’ll get credit without taking the class, right?) Obscurity should be sufficient otherwise.
Also, aside from all the technical stuff… as a student, I just want to say that it sucks having to sit there and listen to pre-recorded lectures. With no video and no interaction, it becomes a pointlessly inefficient way of receiving information, not to mention utterly boring and sleep-inducing. Would this professor be willing to simply put up notes and documents instead? If these audio files were required for a class (as opposed to being bonus review material), I’d likely just drop the class and find another teacher.
Well, you learn something new every day! Thanks for the information.
By the way, for the OP, here is a free Video / Audio player (free for non-commercial use) that I bookmarked once. JW Player