[GNHLUG] [DLSLUG-Announce] DLSLUG Podcast Now Available

[Ben Scott]

On Feb 18, 2008 5:06 PM, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:
> Compression is a signal processing technique which can make the
> dynamic range of an audio waveform more 'consistent' ...

  *Oh*, *that* kind of compression.  Sorry, don't know much about that.

> Right, I tried doing video once and it was majorly labor intensive to
> get decent results.  Volunteers welcome.  :)

  Like I said, it would be a waste of resources anyway, even if we had
them.  A motion video recording of a talking head or slide show is
inefficient at best, and often irritating to the audience.

> Would the slides be worthwhile without an obvious clue about when the
> 'turn the page'?

  Absolutely!  Even if they are not synchronized to the audio, seeing
the slides would be a heck of a lot more than the nothing we have now.
 One can use guess and spoken cues to guesstimate where one should be.
 Just post them along side the audio recording and it'd be worthwhile
content, I think.  Better cues or syncronization would just be gravy.

> Anybody know about a wireless USB presentation device that makes
> a chirp when you click?

  Heh, like the filmstrips we watched in school.  Something could
probably be rigged up in software, I think.  Or just have somebody in
the audience strike a bell when the slide gets advanced.  ;-)

> I guess as-is, it's Berne-convention'ed, so you violated
> copyright law by downloading it. ;)

  I know you're being facetious, but:: My understanding is that, in
the US, listening to a published audio stream without saving it is
considered "ephemeral" and is permitted, provided the original
publisher (you, in this case) has copyright.  Now, if I saved it for
other use, that would be a violation.

  It's telling; the insanity level of copyright law remains at a dull
roar until you get to the special provisions the content cartel has
had written in for their own stuff.  Only then does it go off the
scale.

> I will add this to the standard set of requirements for a DLSLUG
> presentation.  I don't want to deal with different licenses for each
> presenter, but will not record at the speaker's request.

  I'd say that's an excellent approach.

> Good idea, this can be roughly canned too and strung together with
> sox or something.

  My thinking exactly.  It shouldn't be that hard to make it so that
all you have to do is record the current meeting's description and the
trailer (two segments), and feed them to a shell script to edit
together the rest.  With a clever script, the trailer description
might even be usable for next month's description.

> ... so each little bit of canned piece or automated script makes
> it that much more likely that it'll actually get done.

  I can probably have a go at something.  I'll have to dig my mic out
of the closet.

[SPEEX speech codec]
> Hmm, very interesting.  Any idea how well distributed the codec is?

  As in "already installed"?  For practical purposes, close enough to
0% penetration, I think.  But it's Open Source and available for
pretty much any general-purpose computer platform capable of playing
audio, I think.  Pocket audio players are a different story; I would
expect that to be a dead-end, with the exception of people running
Rockbox.

> I went with MP3 over ogg because there's a 100% chance everybody's
> digital music player can handle it.

  Coincidentally, I just rebooted into my mostly untouched Fedora 8
install, and MP3 doesn't play yet.

  I see your point, of course (and even agree with your conclusion),
but presumably you can see mine, too.  :-)

-- Ben