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How to...Place an
audio link on a web page |
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 Simple
Audio Choices
Suppose you want to record an audio message and place
a link to the message on your web page. What are
the steps?
Step 1. Record the audio.
You have three choices:
A. You can record the audio using a microphone,
your computer, and some free audio recording software
called
Audacity. Audacity records in wav, mp3 or ogg
file formats. We recommend mp3. The
resulting audio file will be relatively small and high
quality. wav is an uncompressed format, and
resulting audio files will be much to large for
practical downloading. Ogg is an open source
format widely used in the Linux community, but cannot be
played natively with the most popular media players, so
should be avoided. Your end users will have the
fewest problems if you choose mp3 format.
 B.
If you do not want to use a computer/microphone
combination to record your audio file, you can
check out
a small digital voice recorder from Academic Technology.
We use the Olympus WS-100, and can recommend it to
faculty members if they wish to purchase their own ($79
from
buy.com). Call ext. 2877 for checkout
information. The WS-100 records in wma format (a
compressed, windows media format). It is also a
USB device that can plug directly into any USB port,
which makes it simple to move the wma file from the
device to your computer or directly upload it to your
web site.
Click
here for instructions on using the WS-100. If
you want to convert the file to mp3 before placing it on
your web site, use the free WMA to MP3 converter
available from
Jodix software.
 C.
If you need assistance recording the audio, and would
like to ensure a higher quality recording, come to the
faculty technology center in room LL-111 where we
have a dedicated, soundproof recording booth set up.
The booth is equipped with a high quality condenser
microphone, a mixer board, and SoundForge version 8 for
audio recording. Academic Technology technicians
can help you every step of the way in making your
recordings. SoundForge will export your recording
in virtually any audio format. We recommend mp3.
Step 2. Upload your audio file to the web.
Depending on how you want to present the file, your
have some choices to make here, too:
If you want to take the simplest approach possible,
upload the audio file to your web site for direct
download.
How?
Instructions for a standard web page:
If you are placing the file on a standard web page,
use FrontPage or any ftp program to upload the file.
Using FrontPage:
- Start FrontPage and open your web site
- Choose File > Import...
- Click the Add File... button in the Import
dialog box.
- Locate the audio file on your file system,
select it, and click the Open button.
- The file name will appear in the FrontPage
Import dialog box. Click OK.
- The file will be imported to your web site.
Using any ftp program:
 If
you do not wish to use FrontPage, any ftp program will
do. We recommend
SmartFTP, which is free to academic users.
Follow the connection instructions with SmartFTP to make
connection with your web page. The address of your
web page will be something like
ftp://faculty.palomar.edu/username, where username
is your first initial coupled with your last name.
The username and password for login purposes are your
Palomar College email username and password. For
example, my ftp username is
tgray@palomar.edu and my password is the password I
use to access my campus email.
Instructions if you would rather use Blackboard:
Login to Blackboard and enter your course. Go
to the content area where you want to place the audio
file. Click "Edit View" in the upper right of the
screen. Click "Add Item." Now, depending on
whether you want to embed audio controls or simply link
to the file with a normal textual link, the procedure
varies. See step 3 below for details.
Step 3. Link to the file on your web page.
If you are using FrontPage:
Open the web page on which you want the link to
appear, place your cursor at the link location, and
press Ctrl-K to create the direct link to the audio
file.
If you are using Dreamweaver, GoLive or some other
authoring program:
Make a standard link in the normal manner within your
web design program of choice.
If you are using Blackboard:
If you want a simple textual link, on the Add Item
screen click in the "Attach local file" box in the
Content Area (area 2 on the Add Item page). Click
the Browse button to find the file on your local file
system. Give the link a name in the "Name of Link
to File" box. Be sure the "Special Action" is set
to "Create a link to this file." Click Submit (at
the bottom of the page. Your file will be uploaded
and a link created to it. When your students click
on the link, the media player assigned to the file type
of your recording will be invoked and the file will
play. For example, if you uploaded a wma file, and
your students usually play wma files with the Windows
media player, that player will start and play the file.
If you upload an mp3 file, whatever media player your
students have associated with the mp3 file type will be
invoked and the file will play. This might be the
WinAmp player, the Quicktime player, Real player,
Windows media player, MusicMatch Jukebox, or any of
hundreds of possible players.
If you wish to embed audio controls on the Blackboard
page, instead of following the directions immediately
above, click the "add audio content" icon on the toolbar
of the Blackboard visual text editor:
Complete the "Insert Audio File" page that pops up
and click Submit. Audio controls will appear in
the Blackboard content area. When your students
click the play button on the controls the audio file
will play, provided they have a media player associated
with the file type that you use. We recommend
using either mp3 or wma file types.
The instructions above are for directly downloading
the audio file. If you wish to stream the audio
file rather than presenting it for download,
click here for detailed instructions. For
streaming purposes, you will want to use a common
streaming format, such as wma for Windows media streams,
or rm for Real media streams. You will need an
account on one of our streaming media servers and know
how to write a redirector file in order to do true audio
streaming. Call Terry Gray at ext. 2877 or Chris
Norcross at ext. 3225 for assistance.
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