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Posts Tagged ‘audacity’

Error code 14001 when installing Audacity

2012/04/27 5 comments
  1. Symptom: Audacity installation seems to complete without error, but attempting to start Audacity at the end of the installation process results in an error about bad environment with the above error code.
  2. For your reference: It is has been the missing Visual C++ redistributable installation here in the past on staff computers.
  3. Solution: Download and install the redistributable, then try restarting Audacity: It should start now.
Categories: audience-is-IT-staff, e-infrastructure, Glitches&Errors, Institution-is-University-of-North-Carolina-Charlotte, multimedia-recording, service-is-documenting, service-is-testing-troubleshooting-debugging Tags:

How to use Audacity to repeat audio cues for students when creating listening learning materials

2012/04/27 Leave a comment

A 70-sec screencast:.

Categories: documentation, multimedia-recording, Screencasts, service-is-learning-materials-creation Tags:

How a teacher can use Sanako voice insert to easily add spoken comments to students’ Sanako oral proficiency exams

2012/04/25 Leave a comment
  1. All other things equal (given a limited amount of time), teachers can provide more and better corrective feedback on student oral proficiency recordings if, during their grading, they could easily insert their own oral comments into the students’ recordings (delivered as MP3 files to teachers’ desktops after Sanako oral exams).
  2. Both the Sanako Tutor and Student Player have a voice insert mode that is much easier and quicker to use than (albeit not free as) editing the student audio in Audacity (which we still recommend for bare-bone viewing/listening because of Audacity’s capability of loading and displaying multiple tracks simultaneously).
  3. Fortunately, Sanako tutor/student player are available on the teacher/student station PCs in the LRC (the latter’s insert function is available when the PC connected to the running Sanako Tutor on the teacher station).
  4. How easy and fast is it to use this? As you can see in this demo screencast on how to use Sanako voice insert to add spoken comments into your students’ Sanako oral exams, voice insert only requires:
    1.  a click on the voice insert button in the center, whenever a user wants to speak during listening,
    2. and, from the top left menu, a “file”/ “save as” at the end.
  5. In a next step – not only during the grading process –, how easy is it to distribute student recordings made with Sanako to students? That is TBA:a different story.
Categories: audience-is-teachers, digital-audio-lab, e-languages, grading, multimedia-recording, Presenter-Computer, Screencasts, service-is-assessing, Speaking, Student-Computers Tags: , , ,

LRC Workshop Demand Survey Results

2012/04/24 Leave a comment

image

7 responded, 1 commented. OP=Oral Proficiency.

Categories: audience-is-teachers, Charts, e-infrastructure, e-languages, e-learning, Media, Polls, Visualizations, workshops Tags: , , , ,

How a teacher best adds cues and pauses to an mp3-recording with Audacity to create student language exercises

2012/01/25 1 comment
  1. The first screencast example uses insert tones and a gut amount of pause, for an interpreting exercise, into an authentic German political speech
    1. 1:00 search for a break (button: play/stop  – pause prevents edits)
    2. 1:05 move the cursor to the break (mouse left-click on timeline)
    3. 1:20 insert a pause (menu:Generate / Silence )
    4. 1:25 zoom in (button:magnifying glass, CTRL + mouse scroll wheel)
    5. 1:45 generate a tone (menu:Generate / Noise), change the duration
    6. 2:10 do not replace the selection
    7. 2:20 use undo, just like in MS-word and other programs
    8. 2:30 move the cursor to the start of the selection (mouse left-click on timeline)
    9. 2:40 generate a tone (menu:Generate / Noise)
    10. don’t forget to review results before distributing to students
  2. the second screencast example, of post-editing a questions/response exercise in ESL, takes the amount of pause inserted from the recorded teacher instruction for the student, and uses copy/paste to speed things up even more.
  3. You can also only insert tones and not pauses, as in the 3rd screencast, and allow the students flexible pause lengths, if you can rely on the Sanako Student recorder Voice insert. Or if you must, let students use audacity for recording also, and have them learn how to move the recording cursor around manually, and throw away the source track.
Categories: documentation, e-languages, Listening, Media, Screencasts, service-is-learning-materials-creation, Speaking Tags: , ,

How a teacher grades a Moodle simple file upload assignment

2012/01/13 1 comment
  1. When you initially createdyour single file upload assignment, there were no student submissions: 13
  2. Once there are, the link in the upper right of the assignment will tell you and take you right to the gradebook: 2-assignment-created
  3. Here you have an (1) overview who has submitted, and can click (2) to grade;  14 
  4. In the grading dialogue, you can (1) download and open the file submission (see techniques of grading student audio submissions with Audacity), (2) write comments as you assess the file, (3) assign a final grade and (4) save and move on to the next submission (fastest, when you do batch grading, the notify student of your grading feedback is still useful under these circumstances, but even more so when you your self asked to be notified by email of student submissions as they come in: faster feedback)
  5. 15
Categories: assignments, audience-is-teachers, e-learning, lms, Speaking Tags: , ,

How to record your speech with Audacity

2012/01/11 Leave a comment
    1. For a cut-and-dry recording session, the LRC has a simple instruction on
      1. Recording_an_MP3_Audio_File_Using_Audacity_in_the_LRC here.
      2. Uploading an mp3 recording into a Moodle Forum here.
    2. For more advanced editing with Audacity, I have a detailed screencast here.
Categories: audience-is-language-learning-center-staff, audience-is-language-learning-center-temp-staff, audience-is-students, audience-is-teachers, documentation, e-languages, lms, Screencasts, Screenshots, service-is-learning-materials-creation, software Tags: , , ,

How to do model imitation recording exercises to improve language learner pronunciation in the LRC and beyond

2011/11/22 Leave a comment
  1. Sometimes teachers ask about support for voice recognition in the LRC. The term voice recognition or speech recognition (the former appears to be analogous to face recognition in authentication and other security contexts?) is usually reserved for software that can transcribe your voice into text – still no free option for this, AFAIK. Dragon naturally speaking is the oft recommended market leader outside of education (and within, Auralog Tell me more, see below). Update summer 2012: We are working on enabling the Speech recognition built into Windows 7 Enterprise for English, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), French, Spanish, German, and Japanese.
  2. Often times, what is actually desired is a digital audio recorder with voice graph, ideally a dual track recorder.
    1. In the LRC student computers, we have for exactly this purpose a digital audio recorder as part of the SANAKO Study 1200language learning system
      1. It features a dual track recorder (allows to listen to teacher track which can be a prerecorded model to imitate on the left channel while recording the student track on the right channel of a stereo track) with a voice graph: sanako_student_exe_pane_player_audio_voicegraph_highlighted. See this dual-track-voice-graph screencast demo from the vendor and also our student cheat sheet from the vendor documentation.
      2. The Sanako is available in the LRC, as well as in many other educational institutions around the world, but neither free nor web-based (although a web-based version seems to be in the works). It currently requires MS-Windows to run.
    2. A popular and free audio editor (but not an SLA – specific application, let alone geared towards model imitation; also, for all practical ends and purposes,  requires an extra download and installations of an MP3 encoder to be able to save recordings as compressed MP3) is Audacity. To use for model imitation exercises,
      1. the student can open a model track (mp3 recommended)
      2. and manage within the program the imitation portion, using the voice graph: elti-lynn-question-response-result-audacity-names1
      3. then export  back out as mp3,
        1. either her responses individually (see my demo screencast, requires Windows Media Player on Windows, which actually shows a question/response rather than a model imitation, but same principle),
        2. or, by deleting the model track, the response parts mixed down to one track,
        3. or also, if, like in my demo screencast, the timeline sequence of model (with pauses) and responses is carefully managed (so that model and imitation do not overlap), mixed down to one track.
    3. In one language program, I have worked extensively with Auralog Tell me more
      1. which was (not exclusively, but arguably too much) based on this pedagogic concept of having students compare the voice graph of their imitation with the model voice graph (while it do did not allow for teachers to upload their own content, and was certainly not free). auralog-tellmemore-voicegraph
      2. To my knowledge, Auralog Tell me more does not allow for adding teacher-produced content as models.
      3. I did like the self-reflective and repetitive practice element. However, I found  that students – apart from intonation and (not useful for not pitch based languages) pitch -, did not benefit as much as one might have expected from viewing the voice graph, indeed tended to get overwhelmed, even confused by the raw voice information in  such a voice graph.
      4. And automated scoring of pronunciation (or speech recognition” – not free form, but on a level that has been commoditized in operating systems like Windows 7, the level of voice-directed selection between a limited set of different options, like menu options, and in the case of Auralog, choosing between different response options) seemed iffy and less than transparent in Auralog Tell me more, even though this is  their primary selling point. E.g. when I made deliberate gross mistakes, the program seemed to change its standards and wave me through ( English pronunciation example; also observed by me when testing Auralog with East Asian speakers of English).
  3. A voice graph  is not the same as a more abstract phonetic transcription (although I do not know whether language learners can be trained in phonetic symbol sets like the IPA).  There are now experimental  programs that can automate the transcription of text into phonetic symbol sets for e.g. Portuguese or Spanish. 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.
Categories: Arabic, documentation, e-languages, English, Farsi, French, German, Greek (modern), Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Screencasts, software, Spanish, Speaking, Yoruba Tags: , , ,