Geek-N-Out

The question posed earlier this morning was how could we go about playing an audio clip in conjunction with the opening of a Word document. I’ve found several good links on the process including How-To Geek, Microsoft 2003, and a fairly lengthy blog detailing the process.

There are several concerns on getting this to run smoothly for an array of students, each with their own personal configuration on their computers. It is not unreasonable for an instructor to have a standard setup/configuration that they could require their students to use for the duration of a given course.

An additional set of guidelines states that for optimal performance, the audio files need to be in .wav format which can be easily converted to using audio conversion software such as Bonk (my personal favorite atm). Also, size should remain relatively small to avoid loss of performance when running the presentation. They recommend >50k but >250k is probably not unreasonable. This is all speculation since I haven’t embedded my own yet. Still in the process of downloading the newest version of Bonk.

Follow-up: Word does allow for the files to be embedded into a document. There are a couple issues, however, including increased file size and compatibility when trying to play the file. Word does not have a media player built into it resulting in the computer choosing which program is to be used for the playing. The pc I’m currently using is set to iTunes and so is my mac. My mac gives the error of “Word cannot locate the server application for Package objects” One article I read stated that Word for Mac cannot open embedded objects. Perhaps there is a work around for this but I’m not sure if it is worth the effort at this time. The biggest concern when I look at this situation is the ease of creation and how to ensure that the entire student population will be able to view the material with limited or no configuration changes.

There are several possible alternatives. Macromedia Flash would probably be the most visually appealing option but the learning curve could be substantial. Powerpoint has greater depth for embedding objects (audio/word/video) and could provide a nice visual for the beginning of a given subject.

There are a couple tricks in having it be cross-compatible with Mac Office 2004.

First, you must convert your audio clips to .wav format. There are a couple online tools that provide similar features but Bonk will let you do a whole folder in one pass. The biggest problem with using the .wav file over the .mp3 is the compression rate. Unfortunately, the apple version of the program only accepts .wav as default at this time.

Second, you must increase the size of embedded files in power point. this can be done through the power point option settings -> advanced -> save -> link sounds with file size greater than: (increase this to like 50000)