Audio for Words and Sentences

[Basler Biker]

Hello all,

Many of you have collected words and sentences, or even stories from a variety of sources
Many also have the audio files going with them. Not only our members have them, but for sure also those people who are numerous to visit us anonymously every day,

And let this wonderful material to be so worthful that it should better be shared with other language learners.
Doing so, your effort of having composed your "private" collection, wouldn't remain a one-time act, but would allow other people to enjoy from your efforts too.

The question is now what the best way is to make these "private resources" available in forum.duome.eu posts ... it is easy enough to copy-paste or type text in the post. Also adding pictures, videoclips and attachments is quite easy. But what is the best way to add a simple audio file?

Some of you do it this way, just psting the URL in the post/reply : examples here search.php?keywords=cloudfront

Clicking the audio link opens a new tab or page, and you need to click play.
but how could it be done that

• no new tab or page is opened
• clicking the link does play in the page/post itself

What other techniques can be used, such as

• recording your own voice for the word or sentence, to post it on duome,
  --- either as an example to other learners,
  --- or as part of a question whether your speaking is correct, or how it should be improved.
• using the browser-built-in speech capabilities (e.g. microsofts Bengt is a nice one for Swedish)
• using AI to generate audio, and put the result in duome
• record you own mp3 file and make it available in your posts/replies
• maybe also brainstorm on duome's own collection of audio, not all individual in separate posts/replies, but all audio "together" selectable from a list next to a word or sentence

the storage location should be quite persistent. Some shared locations, clouds, even if the system is not expected to disappear, the accounts who created and posted the files there may not be eternal.

So feel free to share the tricks, and the ways you do it today, and how to improve it.
And do fill in what I seem to have forgotten...

BB

[Corinnebelle]

Did you write this with AI, it sounds mechanical?

[Basler Biker]

Did you write this with AI, it sounds mechanical?

good question Corrinne, ...No I didn't, should I be flattered now?
Maybe AI IS contaguous, we don't know yet, do we? it's all too new ....and if it IS, then, tech bosses will never tell us what the side-effects are on people.

Fact is, AI will never become smarter than humans, and IF, then only because humans get dumber and dumber.
Isn't the human species the only species on Earth (and probably the Universe) that destroys it's own habitat !!

BB

[Explorer]

I hope the new audio files can be played with the old tag [voice]. Otherwise, hundreds or even thousands of posts will be broken until someone edits them one by one. It doesn't seem like the most practical solution.

[Basler Biker]

I hope the new audio files can be played with the old tag [voice]. Otherwise, hundreds or even thousands of posts will be broken until someone edits them one by one. It doesn't seem like the most practical solution.

Of course, old tags will remain. We only add new ones for new functions.

BB

[PtolemysXX]

Some of you do it this way, just psting the URL in the post/reply : examples here search.php?keywords=cloudfront

At the moment the quickest and safest way to bring audio data to duome is by providing links to the cloudfront. I assume that the files on cloudfront are owned by Duolingo and providing links to those files on duome does not violate the copyright. Of course this carries the risk that Duolingo may change the location of those files or remove them completely at their discretion and without notice.

Hence creating duome's own audio sources would be a much better long term solution.

What other techniques can be used, such as

• recording your own voice for the word or sentence, to post it on duome,
• record you own mp3 file and make it available in your posts/replies

I guess that would be the safest option from the copyright point of view: a volunteer would provide mp3-recordings of her/his voice (or someone else's voice with that person's approval) under some sort of "free to use" duome license. Duome might start some sort of "call for anonymous volunteers" among registered and unregistered users by providing instructions how to upload mp3 files?

Clicking the audio link opens a new tab or page, and you need to click play.
but how could it be done that

• no new tab or page is opened
• clicking the link does play in the page/post itself

External links like those to cloudfront are embedded witht he "url" tag and they open a new tab. This is indeed ugly. Perhaps the url tag accepts some additional parameters that could prevent opening a new tab and accept an alias (that would be the recorded phrase) as a clickable link? Something like the "voice" tag does:

좋은 아침

I did not succeed in finding any way to modify the default behaviour of the "url" tag.

If it is not possible and if duome one day has its own data stored somewhere perhaps the "media" tag could be used instead of the "url" tag? The media tag contains a long list of supported media types, maybe one of them would do the job for duome. How about having media files on the Google Drive?

embed media.PNG (9.93 KiB) Viewed 2031 times

I just gave it a try with a simple mp3 file and such "media" tag: it does not open another tab but it does create a frame in the post body like the youtube frame does. so it is still not as nice as the "voice" tag shown above.

Perhaps the "media" tag has some parameters that control the size of the window or permit an alias?

[duome]

Google Drive links don't work because they link to some page where audio file is embedded, but it's not a direct link to the file itself - otherwise it would work through the [audio] tag

[Basler Biker]

OK, then instead of a personal google drive public shared link, I can recommend using a totally free option to

• record your own voice over,
• or upload existing audio files,
  which I described briefly the way to do here:
  viewtopic.php?p=89443-how-to-post-audio ... ces#p89443

The Duome Embedded Audio Player supports at least these two formats, and the format shall be given in the file extension, such as .ogg or .wav or other - most will work here:

This is playing an *.ogg file

This is playing a *.wav file

this plays a recorded TTS (UK English Male AlfieNeural) mp3 converted to ogg format

If you have other audio formats (with a well known file extension) which do play well in duome's audio player, please mention those in a reply here, so we can keep a list of supported formats here.

Or if some format of your audio seems not to be working, mention it and request it via the "Requests new Duome features" forum.
viewforum.php?f=11-requests-new-duome-features

Some audio file extensions

• *.ogg : format of audio recorded via Telegram
• *.wav : format of audio from various sources, but to be avoided as it is not a compressed format
• *.mp3 : format for very common recordings of audio, must music, but also TTS audio generated by some AI system.
• ...
  More on audio file formats here on Wiki : https://wikieducator.org/OER_Handbook/e ... le_formats

There is a discussion on Wiki about copyrights on mp3 files: this is due to the fact that a lot of copyrighted music has been spread in this format, remember the mp3 player introduced by Sony. But the copyright is not on the format of mp3 itself, it's on the music contained in it. So whether mp3 or ogg or wav, any music in it could still be copyrighted. Copyright for music is 60 up to 75 years after first publishing, depending on country.

So for recording and distributing and sharing on duome your own voice over of words and sentences, there shouldn't be any copyright issue.

free conversion of mp3 to ogg format

• install IrfanView64
• use the option "convert" select source file mp3, and select output ogg format.
  ==> the resulting ogg can be uploaded to Wikimedia (unlike mp3's)

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[Samara]

I feel this! It's such a chore getting all the audio clips, but they’re invaluable for review.
If you’re downloading them and trying to keep them organized, one thing that saves a ton of headaches is making sure the files have good metadata/tags. It makes a huge difference when importing them to Anki or other flashcard apps—especially if the filename is just a random string of numbers.
If your audio files end up with messy or empty tags, sometimes using a simple online tool to fix them in a batch can be faster than doing it manually. I sometimes use this for quick fixes when I have a bunch of files that need the title or album data cleaned up- _https://editmp3tags.com/.

Hope that helps with the organization side of things!