User talk:Macropode

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[edit] Barack Obama Spoken Article Assessment

Thanks for the assessment of my reading of the Barack Obama article! I'll fix the 96kbps issue very soon, and aim for higher accuracy when I re-read the article in the near future! Regards, Rahzel 07:13, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Spoken Article Assessment

Thanks for the assessment on my Julius Caesar recording. I changed the recording to mono and I think I succeeded in making it 48 kbps instead of 96. Thanks for catching that! -- Kevin F. Story 21:26, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Taijin Kyofusho

Try tie-jin kyaw-aww-phoo-shaw-aww. Hard J as in jug, Y as a consonant, and aw as in paw. Note the frequent mistake English-speakers make in pronouncing Kyoto as either kye-oh-tow or key-oh-tow; it should be kyaw-aww-taw. This is probably strictly wrong but it's better than nothing. Cheers. --Euniana/Talk/Blog 00:29, 4 September 2005 (UTC)

Thanks Euniana, it's certainly closer to the mark than my first attempt. I'll fix that article in the coming week. Never having had much exposure to cultures other than the one I was brought up in is certainly a disadvantage in producing some spoken articles; I don't want to mislead anyone with incorrect pronunciation. An investigation of (spoken) Wikipedia in other languages might be the way to go. --Macropode 13:00, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Eureka Stockade

I'm just listening to it now and it's great!! Really well done. Your voice is perfect for this project. :) pfctdayelise 11:10, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Coconut crab

Great voice work! --Eeee 07:45, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Oi! Steady on, you two. A person could get a fat ego with talk like that flying around!  :) --Macropode 03:58, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Lend Me Your Ear

Hey... I've been wanting to create some spoken word articles for awhile but haven't until today. I created a *test* file on a small article and would like you to take a listen for some contructive feedback before I begin creating more. Anyway, if you have the time please take a look at Parks_of_Chicago. Jasenlee 03:15, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Social anxiety

Hi, I'm not sure if you've done a new recording of SA, but this is just to let you know, I will probably expand the article this week. Gflores ^Talk 21:23, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Spoken articles

Thanks for the compliment! By the way, I'm impressed with how long you've been with the project. I think a lot of the contributions come from people who record a few articles and then seem to lose interest. (I'm not sure how long I'll be able to contribute, since I don't know what I'll be doing this year.) It's good that you've stuck to it. And your recordings are of fairly good quality, too. T J McKenzie 00:43, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] My RFA

Thanks Macropode

Thanks for your recent support on my RfA which passed 91/0/0. If you ever need anything, feel free to leave me a message! Gflores ^Talk 07:02, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Social anxiety

I was wondering if you could show your opinion on what the title of the article should be (social anxiety disorder, social phobia, social anxiety). Discussion is here [1]. I propose that a new article be created named social anxiety disorder with social phobia redirecting to it and social anxiety will remain that talks about the more common anxiety. You may think differently though. Appreciate your input. :) Gflores^Talk 18:24, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the "Criticisms" edit. That sounds a lot better now. WookMuff 08:08, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Spoken article reply

Hi, thanks for your note. I replied on my talk page so it's all in one place :) --Laura S 22:13, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Hey there. (I'm putting this here because it's literally a reply to your spoken article, specifically Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. :P) Nice recording job - I like your voice. Reminds me of a documentary narrator. Then again, for some reason I've always been biased against Received Pronunciation and in favor of Aussie English. Moulder 06:53, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Well thanks for the compliment but that's not my article :) the only "spacey" one I did was Solar eclipse. -- Laura S | talk to me 12:53, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Looks like we'll have to wait for Raul654 to get back from vacation before we have anything to discuss, since he's the only one on the page who's pushing "con" right now. I don't like his throwing the icon in with "advertisements" for projects since it really isn't an advert...it's another version of the file. I also chafe at his throwing his weight around with statements like "I'm the director of this committee" and "I've been around longer than you have been." Smacks of bad faith, IMHO, but I don't want to get into a power struggle here. That's not fun for anyone. Let's hope we can resolve this satisfactorally. For the record, it might be worth looking through Wikipedia policy to see what we can find regarding Wikipedia and "reusers". I can't find anything. But maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. I don't want to be one of those people who does the "let's ask Jimbo" thing, but it seems like we need to look for precendent to build upon. So far, I've taken the policy that Wikipedia needs to be easy to access and to take advantage of the web as a medium (found in Wiki is not paper and m:wiki is not paper). Ckamaeleon ((T)) 13:54, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't realise. Feel free. :) Rebecca 07:09, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Thank you

Thanks for the compliment! I'm counting on being able contribute more to the project in the future.

--Alekjds 16:01, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Spoken archive

Certainly not - looks like the page is due for an archiving! -SCEhardT 02:23, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Thank You for Your Spoken Article Reviews!

Thank you for adding my articles under your review list. I cannot believe your well-tuned ears and patience! Those mistakes in reading you caught on Article One of the United States Constitution.ogg were spot on (one day in the future when I summon enough patience I will correct them, recording it the first time was a monumental task for me enough :P). I greatly appreciated your reviews. Unfortunately my mic is somewhat low in volume when recording audio recordings. I tried to up the db level but the quality of the recording becomes poorer and too much fuzz gets added to the audio. As far as adjusting the kbps, I attempted to export an .ogg with the proper settings and was successful to do so but somehow the recording become mechanical sounding along with distracting echoes and sacrificing some quality. I also listened to your own audio recordings and I must say they are of excellent quality. All in all, I quite enjoy the WP:SPOKEN project, and longstanding members of it such as yourself are doing an excellent job and inspire me to continue adding to it in the small way I can. Once again thank you :).¤~Persian Poet Gal ^(talk) 21:11, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Spoken Article Reviews

Hi Macropode; many thanks for your very prompt assessments of my first spoken article attempts. As you can see, though, I'm still having trouble with the encoding arrangements ... I use Audacity, and having checked the settings I had used on my first article (James Bulger after you posted your review, I saw the "Quality" slider was at "5 out of 10" - hence the 96kbps. So before doing the next three, I adjusted this to "3 out of 10", while making sure that I was still recording at 44.1 kHz mono ... unfortunately, this has only reduced the quality to 80kbps. Oh dear...! Can you suggest anything I might be doing wrong? With thanks from a technologically naïve Wikipedian - Hassocks5489 09:04, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

You're not necessarily doing anything wrong, and many others seem to be having the same problem.

Although it may sound like a fairly drastic measure, the key to achieving the correct bitrate in Audacity (in the Linux version I'm familiar with), is to move the "Quality" slider all the way to the lowest setting. This compresses the audio more, and will produce the required 48 kbps file. I've personally done this with all the recordings listed on my user page. Although there are minor differences in the configuration dialogue boxes, the same most likely applies in the Windows version. It would be a great help if you would try this with the next audio file you upload so that I can verify that the Windows version behaves the same and include the information in documentation I'm working on to help people with these kinds of issues.

The recommendation of 48 kbps encoding in the recording guidelines arises from the need to keep spoken audio files on Wikipedia as small as possible. Apart from video, which to my knowledge there's very little of on Wikipedia, our large multi-megabyte spoken audio files are probably (per unit) the biggest space-users on the Wikimedia servers, which makes it important to keep the file sizes down. Smaller files are also easier to download, so in practice, more people will get to listen to your recordings if you compress them more.

The default setting of "5", or 96 kbps is a good general-purpose setting which will give reasonably good results with music, which requires considerably more "space" or "bandwidth" than voice does to sound good. If you've ever heard music over a telephone line you might have noticed that while the music generally sounds pretty "tinny" and 'orrible, someone speaking on the other end should, if they're using a modern telephone (and the line's okay!), sound fairly natural. That's because telephone lines are designed to only carry the specific narrow range of frequencies produced by the human voice, and not the much broader range required by music. This way the telephone company can, essentially, squeeze more 'phone conversations down the same cable than they'd be able to if they had to accommodate the broader frequency range required to transmit music well.

Essentially the same principle applies to audio recordings. While a recording of music encoded to Ogg Vorbis (or any other compressed format, for that matter) at 48 thousand bits per second (kbps) will sound very noticeably worse than one encoded at 96 kbps, a voice recording will only suffer a fairly insignificant loss of quality, because voice doesn't need all the "space" provided by encoding at the higher speeds. What this produces is a very much smaller audio file which contains far less unused "space" or "bandwidth, hence the 48 kbps requirement for Wikipedia audio files.

I hope this helps, and doesn't just serve to confuse the issue further. Cheers! -- Macropode 11:56, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks Macropode; that is very clear and helpful. I will record my next file at Quality setting "1" accordingly. I expect it will be ready by this coming Sunday. Many thanks again! Hassocks5489 12:25, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure the file I submitted today (Premier League) is at 48kbps; it's a lot smaller than my others, despite being longer. Let me know with a quick reply just to confirm. Cheers, Hassocks5489 18:22, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

It's showing nominal 60 kbps, average 30 kbps. More importantly, the file's not too big given the size of the article, and it sounds good, so go for it! -- Macropode 23:25, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Great, thanks for confirming that. I'll try to re-record the bit where I screwed up the player transfers; the microphone suddenly went haywire, with lots of weird interference, so I was probably too distracted by that to remember to check the factual content! Hassocks5489 08:49, 6 March 2007 (UTC) - (New corrected version uploaded with the same name tonight.) Hassocks5489 23:04, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Spoken article reviews

Thanks for your reviews of my three spoken articles! I thought the correct .ogg compression in Audacity was achieved by setting the quality to 3, but from reading above I see this isn't the case; I'll be sure to correct this in the next article I read out. Concerning the "breath-thumps", do you have any suggestions for another material to create a screen out of? Being a guy, I don't happen to have many tights lying around the place. =P Cheers,  Panser Born  (talk) 18:12, 13 March 2007 (UTC)

For making inexpensive microphone "pop-screens" they have no equal. Basically, you're looking for a fabric that's:

• Thin. The idea is to diffuse the little "blasts" of breath that occur when you make certain sounds, so that they don't impinge on the microphone and create that "thumpy" noise. At the same time, you want to let the high frequencies in sounds like "ess" and "tee" through, so your voice doesn't sound muffled.
• Stretchy, so the fabric easily conforms to the shape of your wire loop and can be made to stretch fairly evenly over it. This is a job best done by two people; one stretches the fabric taut over the loop while the other sews around it.

My spouse recommends, if you don't have a friend or relative who's willing to donate a pair, that you pick some up from your local supermarket, where they are (in Australia) readily available and cheap. Have fun! -- Macropode 05:34, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Alright, thanks! I'm sure I'll be able to get hold of some tights from somewhere. Cheers,  Panser Born  (talk) 09:30, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

I've now exported and uploaded a lower quality .ogg file (which should now be 48kbps - it certainly managed to shave 5mb off the previous file size) from the master recording for the Star Wars Episode I article, and I thought I'd let you know so you can update the assessment if you wish. I also took the opportunity to correct my pronunciation of "patois". Both the Star Wars Episode II and Image:En-Same-sex marriage in Spain.ogg recordings have undergone the same treatment.  Panser Born  (talk) 20:53, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Excellent! For the many people with slow internet, 5 mega bytes can make the difference between an enjoyable listen and a recording that's just too big to download.

All new Wikipedia spoken recording pages have been going on my watchlist so I can check for updates; I'll start doing that for the ones on Commons too. I'll update the reviews for the above-mentioned recordings shortly. Cheers! -- Macropode 11:15, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

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