Hi, I was chatting with someone today and I was reminded of an idea I'd had in the bath some weeks back.
Audio version of the UWN. This would come out probably the same day or the day after the UWN itself and would be available via an RSS feed. It would be simply an audio version, no extra stuff like you get in a podcast - no discussion, no interviews, just the UWN read out. Now normally I'm not a fan of podcasts where they just read out news articles as they tend to be somewhat dry, but as this would be for accessibility purposes, and would be well described as "audio version of UWN" and not "Ubuntu Podcast", would that make it easier to swallow? Well, I decided to have a go and make one. I have taken a chunk of UWN 59 and read it into a Mic. Note: This is just a sample, the whole UWN isn't in it, most of it is. Here it is:- http://popey.com/uwn/uwn59_demo.ogg So my question is, should we do this? Is there a market for an audio version of our newsletter? If so, what should we do? Have a rotating team of people who take it in turns to make, or a bunch of volunteers. I'll of course volunteer and if nobody else does (and it's deemed to be worthwhile) I don't mind doing it myself. Notes about the recording:- * Proof read the article * Submitted all the long unwieldy links to a link shortening service "linkpot.net" which seeks to make short urls that are reproducible audibly. * Recorded using audacity on Ubuntu. * When I mess up, I stop, delete that chunk, start again from that point * I stopped at the bug stats. * Save as WAV * oggenc -R 22050 -b 64 foo.wav * Is this good/bad? I am clearly not a professional Radio/Podcast type person (although I have been told I have a face for radio more than once), so tips and suggestions are more than welcome. If anyone knows of ways I can make it less dull, more interesting, please say so (although I am somewhat constrained by the content provided by the UWN people ;) ) I used a decent Mic and mixer, then recorded using the manky mic-in on my old laptop. I have a better sound card (sb extigy) which I could also record with if the quality isn't great. I don't have a compressor or other audio kit, but would take suggestions as to improvements that could be made in that dept. Also any suggestions for other audio post-processing welcome. Concerns I have:- * It will be dull to listen to * Nobody will download it, so it would be a waste of time * I encoded as ogg so that we are eating our own dogfood, but would happily encode to mp3 and aac also to support windows and mac clients * I used a 3rd party link shortening service which could a) go away or b) charge for service. Perhaps we could install a link shortening service in the same way that fullcircle magazine have, or maybe we just don't mention URLs. Hosting I don't think is an issue, we could possibly ask Canonical for hosting on a virtual server (in a similar way that the screencasts are hosted). RSS/podcast isn't an issue with drupal (if we put the feed on the fridge for example).
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