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SOLVED: How to record, in Adobe-Flash, video from my built-in iSight web camera on an 2010 iMac, combined with sound from an external cs100 PnP USB audio device
- Problem : Our new campus-wide Moodle Kaltura installation enables authentic oral proficiency examinations (we have no other Moodle Plugin for audio recordings). However, we still have no webcams on our mainstay PCs. We do have a few iMacs with built-in iSight webcams, but for providing students more privacy during their assignments in the language resource center, we need headphones. We have for spare some old headphones which we would like to use up, but they are analogue. These iMacs do not have an analog headset connector, only a line-in which would require a preamp. We have good sturdy USB headsets from Sanako, but these are too expensive to purchase for the iMacs that have no ways to secure them and little other specialized language learning use which we do not already get from the PCs (and more…).
- Workaround :
- Try an inexpensive USB audio device that has 3.5mm analog headset inputs.
- On my iMac 2010
- If in system preferences / sound/ I direct input and output to the USB PnP device
- test passes playing system sounds
- in audacity (if you CRANK the microphone sensitivity to the max!)
- recording test passes: The headset loudspeakers and micro work (not well, but they work, as a tab on the microphone indicate: there is static, and the recording volume is still softish, but better than the built in webcam microphone)
- in Kaltura,
- Flash only brings up the security dialogue (in Safari 5 and current Firefox ESR and Chrome) for allowing the web application accessing to the built-in iSight web camera, but no options to choose a separate audio device
- However, if you control-click on Flash’s a video preview window for the web camera, and click on “settings” (not “global settings”, although that is useful for always allowing access from certain URLs like your LMS) .
- Click on the microphone icon :
- Make sure the USB PnP device is selected.
- You can bring up the settings dialogue, make sure the USB PnP device is chosen for audio and CRANK up the microphone input sensitivity! Then test the volume levels with the built-in volume meter (should show lots of green bars when you speak. You may have to adjust the Califone headset microphone arm so that the microphone is very close in front of your mouth. ) Unlike in the picture, do not choose “reduce echo ”.
- Remaining
- Questions :
- Can this sensitivity setting be permanently stored for all users in the iMac software image, or do our students always have to adjust the microphone sensitivity?
- It remains to be seen whether this inexpensive and unsecurable device survives long when being used by our student population.
- Problem : The review video function of the Moodle Kaltura Flash video remains very temperamental on the Mac OS X (In my testing, one of the numerous problems we had with Moodle Kaltura on the iMacs popped up again: when starting to review the recording, the time counter goes, but the video stalls for a few seconds – afterwards everything seems to play fine, but this is enough to confuse the heck out of my users) . While we made another small step of progress towards enabling Moodle Kaltura webcam recordings in the language resource center, it seems easier to just get web cameras for the PCs.
- Questions :
UIowa.edu phonetics website for learners of English, German and Spanish
Hone your foreign language pronunciation skills by learning about phonetics: This oft-recommended University of Iowa phonetics website “contains animated libraries of the phonetic sounds (….) for each consonant and vowel”, including “an animated articulatory diagram, a step-by-step description, and video-audio of the sound spoken in context”.
How to transcribe English into phonetic alphabet using Phonetizer.com
Phonetizer transcribes into IPA. The vocabulary seems somewhat limited (45000 claimed) – English spelling variants do not help, although Phonetizer offers BE as an input option. I have not found a length limit for the transcription with an article from the current Economist of over 1000 words – should be plenty for most reading/recording assignments in the LRC. Easy as (web2)py. 
The web version is advertisement-based. The downloadable version is not free, so we cannot install it in the LRC, unfortunately.
Windows 7 US-English with German language pack
Just to make sure, we are still in EDT… 
(and the date and other formats do not get changed with the display language either, but so does help and feedback). 
Can you find the error in Microsoft’s German localization in the command line window? Post it below.
Google-Translate for phonetization?
- Google-Translate also offers some phonetic transliterations. You may have noticed this when attempting (remember, though, that it is for a reason that they link to “professional translation” services, and also invite anybody to amend the machine translation offered) to translate from English into other languages,
- However, if you type or paste non-Romanized text into the source textbox, you also get the option button “read phonetically” (meaning transliterate to phonetic symbols or phonetize).
- Limited use in the LRC: Few languages are supported.
- Only languages written in non-roman letters are offered. E.g. French or German are not deemed difficult enough (I know a few that would beg to differ
).
- Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew are also not supported (root cause: right-to-left? Strangely these right-to-left-languages work in the TBA:Google transliterate IME which attempts to do roughly the opposite of phonetization):
- Leaves: Chinese, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Russian. However, note finally that not a standard phonetic alphabet is being used either for these transcriptions.
Phonetic transcription websites
Computerized Language resource centers are supposed to work wonders improving SLA students’ pronunciation: Can’t computers analyze and visualize sound for us?
However, it turned out there seems to be a considerable “impedance mismatch” not only between computers analyzing and understanding the signal, but also between a computer voice graph and the capability of a language learner to process and improve pronunciation on the basis of it.
Voice graphs may have some use for tonal languages. But can you even tell from a voice graph of a letter which sound is being produced?
Enter the traditional phonetic transcription that pre-computerized language learners remember from their paper dictionaries (provided you can teach your language learners phonetic symbol sets like the IPA). Not only are good online dictionaries perfectible capable of displaying phonetic symbol sets on the web (it’s all in Unicode nowadays).
There are now experimental programs that can automate the transcription of text into phonetic symbol sets for e.g. English, Portuguese or Spanish. The more advanced ones also come with text-to-speech.
You can provide your students with audio (or, text-to-speech capability provided) or text models and have them study the phonetic transcription, listen to the audio, and record their model imitation in the LRC. Maybe you will find that practice with recording and a phonetic transcription of the recorded text is more useful for your students’ pronunciation practice than a fancy voice graph.
here
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Learning usage samples: Sanako oral exam, Kaltura webcam presentation, Dictation with speech recognition, Sanako written exam, Chinese and Japanese interactive stroke-order practice
Test the Sanako Installer, Webbrowser Popup Konfigurator for XP, or Windows7, faster LRC TeacherPC Log-in Let MS facilitate diacritics writing by installing for you US-International keyboard layout
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