Week 9 Thing 22 (the Ogg Vorbis)

For this exercise, I decided to explore Project Gutenberg.

I thought that it might be good for our customers to be able to pick a classic novel and listen to it instead of reading it. The youth of today seem to like audio formats to text formats, and project Gutenberg had a lot of classic literature to choose from. I was also unaware that you could listen to the books as well as read them!

For my first foray into the world of audio files, I selected George Eliot and Middlemarch. And then I hit my first snag. It seems that many of the files on Project Gutenberg have a computer generated voice. I was listening, it sounded quite like a robot, and I quickly decided that a computerized voice is not what I need when listening to Victorian Literature. It just doesn't fit.

But luckily, I could also search for human read audio files. For the computer generated files it was easy to do, you just opened the web page and clicked and listened, but for the human read files it required a little more work.

You have to download the human read files and they are in a format that I have never heard of before. They have a .ogg extension. They are called Ogg Vorbis files! I really think that is kind of a catchy name. So I downloaded my .ogg file and put it on my desktop. But my computer balked at this point because I had nothing to open the file with.

But, being the computer genius that I am, I quickly solved that problem by going into Google and typing "opening .ogg files" and wouldn't you know, I found an application called Audacity.

That quickly downloaded and installed and I was able to open my .ogg file and begin to listen to Queen Lucia by Benson. Much more fun to listen to by human voice. And I learned a little bit more about auido files.

I think I am going to spend some more time with the software I installed called Audacity. It appears to be able to do quite a few things and looks like it might be quite fun to play around with. I will be sure to let you know.

This weekend I am going to check out overdrive and maybe download an audio to listen to at home. Looks pretty easy to do, I watched the tutorial and will give it a go.

Then, I am ready to summarize the program and wait for the next list of 23 to do!