Have been spending some time working some audio taped interviews. It turns out that a nice program on the macintosh called "Peak" allows you to record and process audio digitally (in aiff format). At this moment I have 3 hours of interviews on a cartridge drive. (30 minutes takes approximately 78 Mb) After digital encoding, they are being segmented into files of approximately 3- 5 minutes each according to the topic questions of the discourse -- segmenting facilitates quick access to any particular portion of the interview. The visual display of sound makes it easy to locate breaks in the discourse for segmenting. "Peak" also allows digital signal processing, improving the quality of the audio.
With a little more work the data will be re-encoded into mp3 format and then burned to a master cd (up to 11 hours will fit on a cd). Then standard audio cd's will be burned -- one for each interview. The file segments become audio tracks, facilitating the navigation across the interview, and making it available on any cd player, including the computer's.
I have not tried the following yet -- but once the audio is encoded digitally, I envision that collaborators can share audio data using Napster. Napster has a search function that will find files by names/artists and selective naming should make it easy to locate data. data can then be shared through direct transfers.
-- Bill Barowy, Associate Professor Lesley University 29 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA 02138-2790 Phone: 617-349-8168 / Fax: 617-349-8169 http://www.lesley.edu/faculty/wbarowy/Barowy.html _______________________ "One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful." [Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]
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