Hello everyone,
and welcome back to a new episode of my new favorite series called
A new Feature
You’re like “What? Another new feature?! I don’t belive it.”
But it’s true. I am hustling hard behind the scenes and after the (unfinished) dark-mode, the (unfinished) new layout and the (unfinished) new dictionary, I’m really happy that this week I have (un)finished a new nice little add-on that you can use to practice pronunciation….
The Audio Recorder
More and more apps are offering the option for you to record yourself. Some also give you feedback, for others you can at least compare yourself to an original and see where you sound different.
And since I have all those audio examples and dictionary entries I thought it’d be a nice little addition, that you can use if you want to work on pronunciation.
And I found a way to actually do it without spending big cash for software or a developer (for the nerds and geeks among you… I’m using the H5P framework).
I know that many of you are probably not going to use it, it’s really meant as an optional tool and you shouldn’t feel bad if you’re like “Meh, not for me.”
So if that’s the case, you can skip the rest and I’ll see you in a few days with an awesome new article the topic of…. not gonna tell ;).
But for those of you who do want to use or try the new tool… instead of just dumping it online like I usually do, I have decided to prepare a little guide, because there’s a couple of things that are a bit confusing.
How it works
I’m referring to the desktop version of the site here, but on mobile it’s more or less the same.
So… the button is easy to notice in the bottom left corner. Clicking it will open the recording window, and you can also close it using this button.
The recording window then looks like this:
With the “?” at the bottom, you can open and close a little info popup, but that’ll tell you only what I’ll tell you later anyway.
Now, if you click record for the first time, depending on your computer settings, your browser might ask you if my site can access the mic, so just click yes there.
If you DON’T get a window like this and the mic is not working, then you probably have the mic blocked by default. You’ll need to change that in the browser settings. You can allow the mic for only my site there, manually.
Cool.
Now once you click record, you’ll see this screen:
And here’s the one thing that’s really confusing … my natural impulse to STOP recording is the press the button in the middle again. Recording does stop but it’s only PAUSED. It is not completed and you CANNOT listen to it until you “officially” finish.
That’s done with the button on the right with the little “arrow”. I know it, and I STILL find it confusing and keep pressing the wrong button. Unfortunately, that part of the software I can’t really reach, so I can’t change it.
Oh and another thing… the recording WILL CONTINUE unless you stop it. So it WON’T stop just because you close the audio window. That means that if you forget to hit stop, your browser will eventually crash because it runs out of memory.
Some browsers indicate active recording at the top of the tab somewhere but yeah… make sure to press STOP.
All right, now when you’ve stopped the recording you the get the listening window, which looks like this:
It’s pretty self explanatory except for the one question that all of you are wondering:
Can you save your recording?
The answer to that is… technically yes, but.
You can NOT save it online in your profile, that would blow up my server after a while.
But you can download it by clicking those three dots. The thing is… the software I am using does NOT have the licenses to convert the file to mp3, so what you’re saving there is a .wav-file which gets pretty big pretty fast. 25 seconds is already 1 MB of data.
I mean, a sentence or a word is pretty short, so it might still be feasible, but yeah… it’s NOT mp3.
Just to make sure though… the recording is done on your device, so “downloading” is basically just “saving”. You do not use your mobile bandwidth for it, and you can use the feature offline.
***
So yeah, that’s my new audio recorder. I kind of did it on a whim and I’m actually really happy to have it now and I hope you have a lot of study fun using it.
Let me know in the comments how you like it and if you think you’ll be using it. And of course all the bugs, so if something isn’t working with the recording or the layout.
Ich freu mich auf euer Feedback, have a great week and see you soon with the next article and it’s gonna be about… drumroll…
ja.
wpDiscuz
