Audio Guide

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Sites that use audio for language learning

ELLO (English Listening Lesson Library Online) Lots of listening activities

http://www.elllo.org/

Breaking News English – news stories with lots of language activities
   Similar types of activities by the same content creator at:        http://www.freeeslmaterials.com/sean_banville_lessons.html
ESL Lab – Many listening activities
Lyrics Training – Using songs to practice language skills
Other Sties

Jeff’s favorite use of audio in the classroom these days – Voice Recognition!

Text to Speech Tools
Audio Utilities
Media Players
Online Recording
  • Clyp.it upload audio and embed it on your website – now, premium only 🙁
  • How to embed audio with Google Drive
    Use this code
    <iframe frameborder=”0″ width=”400″ height=”60″  src=”https://drive.google.com/YOURURL/preview”>
    </iframe>

 

File Conversion
Extract Audio from online video

AudacityAudacity – a free, cross-platform, open source tool for recording and editing audio.  Installing and Using Audacity– You can download the latest version of  Audacity here. –
 Audacity Introduction Screencast


Basic Record, Stop, & Play Controls  

To edit the audio, click the ‘selection tool

highlight and then the delete button on your keyboard. You can use the magnifying glass to zoom in or zoom out.  To remove a track, click the ‘x’ and start again.


Saving a file as an mp3 To do so, click ‘File/Export’

Save as file type ‘mp3’.

When the edit metadata window pops up, you can enter information or ignore it. (meta data is the info you would see on your mp3 player when listening to this file).

In the save as window, options allows you to change the bit rate (quality of the file – bigger=larger file, higher quality). 64kbs should be fine. Click ‘save’.

 

Sources of Audio Books and other recordings

Podiobooks

 

 Podiobooks offers complete books in episodic form so you can get just a chapter at a time via RSS or by iTunes. In addition, you can simply click and listen to a story online. Think of a serialized story when it comes to Podiobooks. You can download the serials/stories directly to your computer, transfer the entire file(s) to a CD for listening again and again, or put the story on your MP3 player so you can listen to it wherever you might be.
Open Culture Open Culture is a portal to the finest educational and cultural resources on the Web. They’ve got a very respectable collection of great audio books, mostly classics, available for free in a variety of downloadable formats from all over the Web. Books are organized alphabetically by author’s last name by genre: Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Poetry.
Internet Archive The Internet Archive has a very good collection of free audio books and poetry recordings from a eclectic variety of sources. There are a number of ways you can find books to listen to here, including by subject, keywords, alphabetically, or by title. You can also check out the most downloaded items of the week (sorted by popularity), the most downloaded items of all time (again, sorted by popularity), or by what the Internet Archive staff has picked as their favorites for the week.
Librivox Librivox is an entirely volunteer-curated collection of free audio books that are in the public domain. Volunteers read chapters of these books, and the chapters are then placed online for public consumption. You can find titles to listen to at Librivox by searching by author, title, language, browsing the entire Librivox catalog, or checking out the most recent additions to the website.
Learn Out Loud Learn Out Loud is a gigantic collection of free audio books, lectures, and educational podcasts. Here, you can find all sorts of interesting content divided into categories as diverse as Arts and Entertainment, Business, Sports, or Travel. You can also filter your search results by Audio Download, Online Audio, Most Popular, Alphabetical, Author Name, Average Member Rating, or Featured.
Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg is one of the oldest and largest sites on the Web, offering thousands of free, public domain books both to read and to listen to. Their audio books project offers free downloads in two main categories: human-read audio books, and books read by computer-generated voices. Burrow into either of these categories and you’ll see listings sorted by author, title, and language.

Podcasts – audio recordings that are posted online in a way that allow people to subscribe the program and listen to them on their computers or mobile devices Podbay.fm Podcast Directory

Podcasts with Transcripts

Selected Faves

GENERAL PODCASTS

Language Podcasts
Windows audio settings

When using a flash-based online recorder, you will usually get a pop-up window that looks like this

You will need to click allow and possibly adjust the microphone settings.  Then click clowse.

You may also need to adjust recording settings by RIGHT clicking on the speaker icon and selecting recording devices

Phone Audio Practice Recording, Converting, & Publishing Audio from your Smartphone Screencast Guide Here

Smart phones can be an easy way to record conversations in a language class. Andriod phones come with a default recorder and there are many free apps available for Android and Iphones.

 

Optional Task : Record some audio on your phone. Most messaging apps (Kakao, Band, Hangouts) now support audio message, however exporting those and/or publshing them esle can be challenging. One of the issues with phone recordings is that they are sometimes saved in file formats (like .amr or m4a) that are not easily shared via Kakao, Band, or other apps. There are several ways to convert these files to friendlier formats. (Screencast Guide Here)   You can use online converters (listed on the Audio Guide) or upload your phone recording to your Google Drive and install the Driver Converter app by clicking ‘Open with/Connect More Apps/and find ‘Drive Converter’. I suggest converting that file to an mp3 file. You can also install the Clyp.it app and record that way (although you will not be able to download an mp3 and/or edit the file).

 

 

Audio Settings Sometimes you’ll need to adjust your audio settings in order for you microphone to be recognized. To do so, RIGHT click on the speaker icon in the bottom right corner of your screen. 

Select ‘Recording Devices’.  You’ll see a list of recording devices on your computer. Click the you are using and then click ‘Properties’.  Select the ‘Levels’ tab and make sure the volume level is not too low or muted.

To record audio from  non-mic sounds on your computer you can now use Ocam or the the more complicated method of selecting ‘Stereo Mix’ as your recording source.

Make sure to ‘Show Disabled Devices’.

Enable Stereo Mix

In Audacity, click ‘Edit/Preferences’ and under Devices, select Stereo mix at your Recording Device.

 

The screencast below shows how to use Audacity.      Audacity Introduction Screencast

Adding an audio flash player to your blog post:   The easiest way (as of 2015) is to use a site like http://clip.it.  Simply upload the file, and copy the embed code to your blog. An alternative method is to use a site like  PBWorks (Guide here). to upload your mp3 file.

– Copy the URL of your audio file and use that to post a link to it to your blog. To do so, RIGHT Click, Copy Public Link To embed an audio file with a flash player, use this code:

<embed flashvars=”audioUrl=MP3_FILE_URL” height=”27″ quality=”best” src=”http://worldbridges.net/files/3523697345-audio-player.swf” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”400″></embed>

This will result in a flash player like       instead of a download link like:  https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/46186053/Falling%20slowing.mp3

Free Music Downloads

Readings

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