Podcasts--The Time is Now!
I emailed Tim Holt and haven't heard back--so I'm getting desperate. Below is the email I sent him.....
I’ve been fussing and fretting about podcasts for months. Several weeks ago I turned Audacity over to some of my students and they figured it out in a minute. NOW is the time to really do something. Each student is going to podcast as their passenger or crew member on the Titanic—I have some questions.
1. After each kid records their cast into Audacity do we save the files as WAV? I did that with a practice track.
2. I then imported the file into Frontpage (I use that for my webpages)
3. I then found a podcast icon
4. I then linked the icon to the file
All works well except I thought the podcast would just start playing, I didn’t know it would open Windows media player.
What are these? http://web.forret.com/tools/podicons.asp Is there a way to click on an icon and have the file play?
Here is my sample!! Click on the orange icon http://connections.smsd.org/titanic/asplund.htm
What am I doing wrong? What do I need to know----before tomorrow 9:00 am?!!
I’ve been fussing and fretting about podcasts for months. Several weeks ago I turned Audacity over to some of my students and they figured it out in a minute. NOW is the time to really do something. Each student is going to podcast as their passenger or crew member on the Titanic—I have some questions.
1. After each kid records their cast into Audacity do we save the files as WAV? I did that with a practice track.
2. I then imported the file into Frontpage (I use that for my webpages)
3. I then found a podcast icon
4. I then linked the icon to the file
All works well except I thought the podcast would just start playing, I didn’t know it would open Windows media player.
What are these? http://web.forret.com/tools/podicons.asp Is there a way to click on an icon and have the file play?
Here is my sample!! Click on the orange icon http://connections.smsd.org/titanic/asplund.htm
What am I doing wrong? What do I need to know----before tomorrow 9:00 am?!!
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Shana Smidt on
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Nancy, I'm far from an expert as I have only used Audacity for one project and it was just last month. However, this is what I see. When you save your project you have a choice as to the type of file that you want to play. No matter what format you choose, you have to use a player. Think of having a cassette tape, a cd and a dvd-these are formats. They all need a specific player. You are deciding which player to use when you choose the format. If you choose to save as an Audacity file, .aud or something, then you will need to have Audacity installed on every computer that wants to play your audio file. Most computers probably don't have Audacity installed, but most have Windows Media Player, so a .wav is a good choice. There may be a web page trick to keeping the player behind the page, but that is not something that I'm very familiar with. I just do basic Frontpage. I like your Titanic page. I plan to share your link with a couple colleagues. Good luck!
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Permalink Reply by Kelley Irish on
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Nancy,
I located this in one of my Front Page files- hope it helps!
SUMMARY
This step-by-step article shows you how to import and add a background sound to your Web page. Some of the more popular background sound formats for Web pages are:
.aif Audio Interchange Format File (AIFF)
.au Sun/Next Audio File
.mid MIDI Sequence File
.mp3 MP3 Format Sound File
.snd Sun/Next Audio File
.wav Microsoft Windows Wave Sound File
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Step 1: Import the Background Sound File
To import the file into your Web, follow these steps: 1. Open a Web, and then switch to Folder view.
2. In the Folder list pane, click the folder that you want to import the background sound file into. If you do not want to import the file into a specific folder, click the root folder (the first item in the Folder list pane).
3. On the File menu, click Import.
4. Click Add File.
5. Select the file that you want to import, and then click Open.
6. Click OK.
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Step 2: Assign the File As the Background Sound
You can either use the Page Properties dialog box or you can edit the HTML code.
Method 1: Set the Page Properties
1. In Normal view, right-click the page, and then click Page Properties on the menu that appears.
2. Click the General tab.
3. In the Background sound section, click the Browse button.NOTE: Some sound file formats, such as .mp3 files, are not displayed in the dialog box. For these files, you have to manually type the path of the background sound file in the dialog box. For example, if a file that is named Song.mp3 is stored in a folder that is named Music, this is how the path looks:
Music/Song.mp3
If the file is in the root, this is how the the path looks:
Song.mp3
4. After you select a file or type the file name, click Open.
5. In the Loop box, type or select a number to specify the number of times that you want the song to play.
6. Click OK.
Method 2: Edit the HTML Code
1. Switch to HTML view.
2. Type the tag between the tags. For example, if you want to use a file called Song.mp3 as the background sound file and this file is saved in a folder named Music, your tag looks similar to the following:
3. If the Song.mp3 file is stored in the root instead of a specific folder in your Web, the tag looks similar to the following:
The following table explains the Loop values that you can set for the tag:
Loop Value Description
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
-1 The background sound will play repeatedly as long
as the page is open.
0 or 1 The background sound will play one time.
n The background sound will play n times, where
n is a number greater than 1.
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Step 3: Save and Preview the Page
1. On the File menu, click Save to save the Web page.
2. Make sure that your speakers are working, and then click Preview in Browser on the File menu.
NOTE: The larger the size of the file, the longer it takes to load the page.
Back to the top
REFERENCES
For additional information about how to use background sounds with FrontPage, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
307245 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307245/EN-US/) FP2000: Background Sound Options Appear Dimmed, Are Unavailable
196138 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/196138/) HOW TO: Play Background Sound in Netscape Navigator in FrontPage 2000
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Permalink Reply by Arlene Anderson on
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Nancy,
If you save your audacity files as MP3 you can save them in iTunes, or Window Media Player, Real Player and the like. The easiest is to upload them to GCast and then embed the GCast icon into your webpage. Here's my webpage (wiki) with the instructions for the conversion to MP3
http://saugusedtech.pbwiki.com/
In the sidebar on the right is a tab that says podcast directions. Hopefully you can find everything there. I like GCast because it has not adds (like podomatic) and can be easily embeded.
Arlene
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Permalink Reply by Ben Bleckley on
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I would suggest saving the files as mp3. The advantage to this is that the files will be much, much smaller than wav files and load faster. The downside is Audacity needs an additional plug in for it to be able to encode mp3. It is free if your computers don't have it already, you can download it here.
As for being able to click on something and then have it play, you can make the mp3 or wav file a link like you were going to any other webpage - or you could make your orange button a link to the file. Then when you click on the button or link, the person can choose to open or save the file. If they hit open, it will open in Windows Media Player. If they hit save, it will save to the computer, and then they can open it with Windows Media Player.
Sorry, I don't know how to get it to play in the webpage without some sort of player.
Hope this helps!
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Permalink Reply by Dena Coots on
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http://www.how-to-podcast-tutorial.com/videos/11-audacity-tutorial-...
This guy has an awesome tutorial online. This will show you how to save as an Mp3. I had trouble getting WAV files to play inside of an html page, so I recommend the MP3 because it will be more universal.
What an awesome project. Well done!
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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on
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Thanks to all who replied--never did hear from Tim Holt!! I think I got it all figured out by the time the kids got here this morning. Thanks Dena--I'd found those tutorials and showed them to the kids. Thanks Ben for the heads-up about the encoder plugin in. My tech guy, luckily, was able to d/l it remotely this morning before school. We'll finish up next week. We're making forward progress!
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Permalink Reply by Karen Fasimpaur on
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Saving the files as MP3 is the way to go. That format is the most compatible. (If you haven't already figured this out, you'll need to get the LAME DLL for Audacity. It's a free download. Send me a note if you need more info.)
The issue of a player opening is related to posting a link to a file (WAV or MP3) vs. embedding a player in the web page. (If you go to my podcast page www.k12handhelds.com/mashups, you'll see an example of an embedded streaming player. You just click a play button to play it.) I use Wordpress with the Cool Player add-in to do this. Another (easier) way to do this is to post the messages somewhere like Classroom 2.0 that has an "embed" code available. This will give you a snippet of HTML code that you can paste into your web page to embed a streaming player. It's easy and looks slick.
One last thing...technically, to be a podcast, you'll want to have an RSS feed so that people can "subscribe". The easiest way to do this is to post links to your podcasts on a blog. The blog will automatically generate an RSS feed that people can then use to subscribe in iTunes, Google Reader, or whatever feed reader they use. (There are lots more ways to create RSS feeds, but this is the easiest, I think.)
Hope this is helpful!
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Yes, the player is the missing piece. I'll see what I can do. I wonder how I would embed a player on my website.
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If you upload your audio to your Classroom 2.0 site first, all you'll need to do is paste the embed code into your own website.That will put a Flash player in.
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