Hypercompendia

Have decided to stop working on the audio for a bit, until I get either permission or refusal to permit the use of the audio I’ve been working with. I have sent a request by email to the composer/artist, and am awaiting a reply. While it was necessary to use something to learn the Audacity program and I got more and more excited with the selection, it’s useless to go too far with it if permission is denied.

Then it’ll be back to the drawing board to seek new Spanish guitar recordings, or have someone make something up for me. It’s going to be hard; the piece was just so beautiful, and beautifully played.

Knew there was a way and played with a discarded .wav this morning to figure out how to add some “silence” moments in between the music in a clip.

Instead of recording a clip over and over again until I get the proper selection both time-wise and chop-wise, I’ve learned I can make a clip, then cut the clip itself in Audacity to shorten it.

Also learned how to add in some silence to extend a clip anywhere from the beginning (may be a way of “opening” the audio file later in the page rather than fiddling with jQuery and links to delay the start) or to add in some time between the notes.

Most likely I’d be able to also drop in some notes if needed, but I really don’t want to mess with the original too much; I’ve already “replayed” some sections to either suit mood, or extend the 9 minutes of audio to fill about 20 minutes of reading.

I just need to keep in mind that the music, while it would be terrific to match it perfectly to the reading, is impossible because each reader will read at a different pace. On top of that, the inclusion of hypertext links brings in another whole method of reading that changes the actual time spent on a page. i.e., will a reader open the links (stretchtext) and read that and go back to the point where he clicked the link or will he finish the visible text and then click the link? There are images; will the reader take any time to look deeper into them?

Need a soft start to the music, and an even softer ending, almost a fade, so that it is not noticeable to the reader that the music stopped (already decided to make the clips on the short side rather than have them run over past the reading point of all but the speed-reader, though I need to have someone besides me read this to check it out).

Need then, to learn the volume controls to learn fade I guess, unless there are more subtle controls.

Spent the late evening and this morning’s early hours selecting seconds of audio and matching them up in separate .wav files with a page of hypertext. Redid many, over and over and over again, dumping in favor of creating something more in time with the reading (though I suspect my reading is varying in degree with each successive try, either I tend to scan, or completely hip-hop over words out of boredom with re-reading over and over again). And a break in mental focus brought me to web-surfing and a whole new problem. And a big one.

Copyright. I’m a hater of plagiarism and scoffing up someone’s work without credit so I was completely aware that I’d give due notice of the artist and recording at the end of the piece. However, I didn’t realize that the perfect song I’d downloaded was played (and probably written) by an outstanding professional Spanish guitar player. I can’t really go much further with my own work of weaving it into the hypertext without seeking and hopefully gaining his permission to do so! An email must be drafted and sent out asap.

Also tried again to connect a music .wav file to a link (preferably using the same link as a stretchtext link) but still lose all the text and instead gain an audio “player.” This is what I’d been trying (in the abob2 folder):

<a href=”file:///Users/smgct1/Desktop/abob2/Improviso 1.wav”> (and end tag)

What I get is an audio player playing the wav on a white blank page. All text disappears as it hops onto that, a new page, rather than the stretchtext.

I’m guessing that the code that makes it play in the head section, which is:

<EMBED src=”Improviso4.wav” autostart=true hidden=true>

can possibly be manipulated, maybe with the instructions (autostart or hidden) or used as a jQuery code (have to look into this–it’s been a while since I learned it and need to reacquaint myself with that) or the embedding tag.

Timed a reading of A Bottle of Beer, complete with clicking all the links, and I’ve come up with around 23 minutes. I marked each page with the time count, in seconds, and what I’ll probably do is mark how much each one truly needs sound. Somewhere in between I wouldn’t mind either complete silence, an odd sound (like the ice cream truck–no, just kidding).

Second, I want to match the pace of the audio to the drama of the section of the story. While the musical piece I’ve selected is certainly near perfectly suited to the mood, there are some dramatic pauses and some sections with a quicker tempo.

Third, While I’ve timed my reading of the piece, everyone reads at a different pace. What I don’t want to do is let the music run over and be cut off by a click to the next page, nor do I want it to stop too soon, or just at the wrong moment.

All this, while keeping the musical “narrative” fairly intact, aside from a few single strums or a couple notes that hang like bells and produce a great effect in their simplicity.

Before I go any further, I need to time the reading of each page approximately, since some have several stretchtext links that will hold the reader to the page longer.

Downloaded a free program called “Alarm Clock” for the Mac, needing really only the stopwatch capability it had and the fact I can keep it on the Desktop–the fastest way to stop and start it while at the same time opening a page and clicking links. Works pretty well–”Yolanda”, the first page of text, clocks in at 41 seconds.

I likely won’t have the music playing throughout, and really, what I want to do is open some pages silently while having the background audio start up maybe during a stretchtext link. So far, I haven’t been able to figure this one out but it’s not as important as these preliminary timing of the pages and the planning to clip out sections of the 9 minute audio file. Some can obviously be used over again.

The biggest test for me, if all this works well, is to avoid overindulging and madly adding in sound effect clips. Like for the squeaking of her rocking chair on the porch. Or when she rolls her husband down the cellar stairs.

So with much flourish and ado (a.k.a. screwups and duplications), I have separated out the first few notes of the song in Audacity and converted it into a separate .wav file and can embed it on a separate page. Actually, I tried embedding it before a link of stretchtext but it opens immediate upon opening the page. That’s okay, I can live with that for now.

What I was not able to do is to turn it into an MP3 directly from Audacity because it claims that it can not find the MP3 encoder library, which I thought I also downloaded from some LAME site. I’ll work out that problem later, but will use the .wav files for now. Because they’ll play with me.

Also have to learn to be quicker on the Selector button.

Downloaded the latest version of Audacity since my installed program was so out of date it was unworkable.

Downloaded some basic instructions from the manual and hope to teach myself how to break the 8.52 minutes of the tune into segments spread throughout the piece.

First step, I suppose, is to estimate reading time for each page. An approximate will do; there is stretchtext involved whereby what I might try is to stick the audio file snippet into the link that opens that up, rather than have the audio begin at the opening of each page.

That is, if I can cut this up and make new itty-bitty files from it.

Okay, placed the same code on the second page, hoping against hope it would play continuous (that’s the good thing about doing things on your own, you always have hope that something will work). Of course, all it does is start over from the beginning.

One thing that bothers me about some of the new media presentations are the repetitious sounds or music. I would love to have this thing play throughout the piece, to completion. Then again, each reader will have to promise to read the entire piece in exactly 8.52 minutes.

I suppose it’s possible to break the piece down into segments and embed each page with a segment–the music certainly would allow for that, the way it is, a guitar solo.

Now all I have to do is figure which program on the Mac might be willing to do that and then figure out how to use it.

Whoo-hoo! Found the perfect Spanish guitar audio, embedded it and it works! Until you click onto the next page.

Downloaded a free mp3 nine-minute solo guitar that has the perfect mood for Beer. Made a copy of the file and threw it into my abob file on the Desktop, then made a duplicate of the opening page of abob and simply used the embed tag to place it last in the head section of the code, just under the </title> tag like this:

<EMBED src=”10 Improviso 2 (a Anouar Brahem) copy.mp3″ autostart=true hidden=true>

Works perfectly; goes on automatically, plays until…

…you click the link to the next page.

Have found that the back/forward arrows DO work on the files, at least in the Mac/Applications file and the Drive file. I’ve yet to check it on the Windows platform but I’m sure it’ll work. Also want to change to maybe Chrome as the default browser there.

Have yet to put the correctly linked program into the Win PC. Had to take it off the thumbdrive, stick it on the Mac, change the links there, and somehow get it back onto the thumbdrive. There seems to be a problem where it wouldn’t even save changes on files there due to lack of space, and it isn’t noticing that I pulled off megabytes of stuff to make room. May clean off the whole drive again and replace the three file formats fresh.

If that all works, my next thing may be to burn it to a CD, with the proper adjustment in path (at least for the Drive folder). Then, something exciting: finding audio files to stick in!