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Digitizing FSI | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Sir Nigel Senior Member United States Joined 7104 days ago 1126 posts - 1102 votes  2 sounds | Message 177 of 237 10 September 2005 at 7:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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You can buy it here. You might have to get Sound Forge also to use it. I think they combine the two for a little discount.
Just curious, when digitizing FSI has anyone ever had problems with the tapes themselves? I had a few that would just stop halfway through. I had the Barron's tapes and it's like they had too much tape at one end, thus stressing the player and causing it to stop. Rewinding the tape a few times helped. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| morprussell Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7163 days ago 272 posts - 285 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 178 of 237 11 September 2005 at 3:43am | IP Logged | ||
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Sir Nigel, thanks for the recommendation. I downloaded the trial versions of "Sound Forge 8" and "The Noise Reduction 2.0". They say that they are fully functional trials that will work for 30 days.
I removed the noise from a sample section, and I have to say it did a great job. The audio sounded great. The only problem was it added loud beeps onto my audio. I'm guessing this is because it's a trial version. I'm hoping that I just forgot to turn off the "add loud beeps to my audio" feature, but I don't think that is the case.
I haven't had this problem. I'm digitizing with Multilingua tapes and I own some Barron's as well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| omicron Senior Member United States Joined 7121 days ago 125 posts - 132 votes Speaks: English* | Message 179 of 237 11 September 2005 at 5:07am | IP Logged | ||
Have a look at Audio Restoration under the Tools menu. The Click removal might take care of the added beeps. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sir Nigel Senior Member United States Joined 7104 days ago 1126 posts - 1102 votes 2 sounds | Message 180 of 237 11 September 2005 at 9:04am | IP Logged | ||
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No, the beeps are part of the demo. They're pretty random too, making it rather hard to remove. ;)
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| Duke Groupie United States Joined 7019 days ago 76 posts - 79 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 181 of 237 16 September 2005 at 3:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Has anyone written a letter to the Foreign Service Institute asking whether these programs are in the public domain?
If they are indeed in the public domain, then here is my advice for distributing the audio in the least amount of work: 1) Obtain CD version of the course. 2) Convert each CD to ISO files. There is only 1 ISO per CD, so less files to hastle with. Here is step-by-step instructions for how to create an ISO with MagicISO, but you can probably find other pieces of software that make ISOs. 3) Upload the ISO files to the Internet Archive, a place that stores many public domain audio and video. Here is instructions for uploading the files. 4) Now other people can download the ISOs freely. Those people can either burn them directly to CD or dice them into hundreds of separate audio files in a variety of audio formats or run noise cancellation filters on them, and upload those to the Internet Archive as they like. This makes the work a cooperative effort instead of a cottage industry, so that no one person has to hold the entire workload and people can contribute in areas where their particular area of expertise or resources can be put to use. Edited by Duke on 17 September 2005 at 12:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| delectric Diglot Senior Member China Joined 7181 days ago 608 posts - 733 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: German | Message 182 of 237 17 September 2005 at 5:17am | IP Logged | ||
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No converting a CD to an ISO file is a slow way of distributing the files. A CD is about 700mb!
You really need to convert the audio into usable mp3 and then into a .zip or .rar file, to make downloading more efficient. You could probably fit the audio of the entire FSI Chinese course onto one 700mb CD if the CD's are encoded efficiently into usable mp3. As for are the Chinese FSI files in the public domain? I'm sure there is a short note on the booklets that I have that say, if FSI Chinese is distributed for a non-profit purpose then this is ok! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Duke Groupie United States Joined 7019 days ago 76 posts - 79 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 183 of 237 17 September 2005 at 12:25pm | IP Logged | ||
You can also use a file splitter to cut the ISO into pieces for easy uploading and downloading. Still, the sum total number of bytes will be much larger than if you converted it to another audio format to begin with. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sir Nigel Senior Member United States Joined 7104 days ago 1126 posts - 1102 votes 2 sounds | Message 184 of 237 17 September 2005 at 10:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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The audio quality is okay as long as you know what you're doing with mp3s. They have to be a decent bitrate otherwise they sound bad. In addition you can half the size and double the quality by only doing mono files. However scanning in the book for the course might be a pain. Anyone ever done this?
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