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Using and abusing FSI material | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| onebir Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7168 days ago 487 posts - 503 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 1 of 3 29 August 2010 at 5:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've recently thought of a couple of possibly newish ways to deal with FSI audio.
1) Using: a) The pauses in drills can be too long or short & can vary dramatically for no obvious reason. With an ordinary MP3 player this is a pain. But if you use software that shows the amplitude of the MP3 you can see if I need to pause &/ how much to skip ahead. This makes the drills quicker to do & slightly less stressful. So far my favourite for this is MP3directcut (Windows & supported in Wine on Linux I think). This natively supports MP3s (unlike Audacity) and has good keyboard controls (space=stop + L/R cursor keys. b) Reviewing. I've also been using MP3 directcut to chop up each tape into drills on first listening, then when I'm happy with a drill, prefixing its filename so it goes to the top of the folder. 2) Abusing FSI often leaves me quite 'drilled out'. Used for self study I think they rely too heavily on substitution-agreement drills, & lack less stressful practice methods. One solution is to use other material for listening, shadowing etc. Depending on the language finding (&/ adapting) this can be very time consuming. Shadowing -rather than doing - the FSI drills - would be far easier, but wasteful because of the huge gaps. Time spent editing the gaps out manually would also be wasted. Today I discovered that Audacity 1.3 has inbuilt gap removal (effect-> utility-> timeline changer-> truncate silence). You can customise the length of the gaps, and also use "change tempo" to slow down the audio for shadowing if need be. I'm hoping that by abusing the drills - shadowing them for a few days before doing them "properly" - they'll abuse me less... Questions: 1) does anyone know of MP3 players that show a waveform & allow skipping for handhelds/phones (esp android)? 2) are there good alternatives MP3directcut for desktop use? (Especially ones that can be configured to take up minimal screen - allowing easier reading of a PDF onscreen &/user configurable keyboard controls.) 3) can anyone think of a good way to integrate this with SRS (or similar) - "one drill = one card" or other paradigm? 4) is it possible to write scripts for Audacity? (eg to remove silences from a batch of drills, slow them down & join them together?( 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5325 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 2 of 3 29 August 2010 at 11:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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There's some information on Audacity's batch mode in this older thread.
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| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5303 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 3 of 3 29 August 2010 at 11:09pm | IP Logged | ||
Here http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/man/man1/audacity.1.ht ml one can read: "Audacity is an interactive, graphical editor, not a batch-processing tool. There are no options which make it easy to perform an operation on a set of files. If you need to batch-process audio or do simple edits from the command line, use sox." Here (Sox homepage) one can see that sox does support the remove silence function. So this may be a good option. If needed I could have a deeper look what exact batch instructions you have to use, but if you find out how to do it and can post success I would not mind either ... Edit: Looking at the thread Doitsujin mentioned I seem to have found some really old audacity documentation with really outdated information. Well, sorry for this, but sox may nevertheless be an option. Edited by lingoleng on 29 August 2010 at 11:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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