Electoral Boundaries Commission: Getting Audio Online

We have been providing web support to the Electoral Boundaries Commission of Prince Edward Island. One of the interesting facets of the Commission’s website is that the audio of all of the public meetings is available online.

Here’s a brief outline of how this worked.

The audio technicians at Multimedia Services plug a Sony digital sound recorder into their PA system, and record the entire proceedings. They convert the proprietary Sony-format file into a standard Windows WAV file, burn it on CD-ROM, and pass it along to me.

I load the WAV file into QuickTime Pro and split it up into individual files for each speaker.

Using the AT&T Natural Voices Demo, I prepare a spoken introduction to each speaker’s presentation (this lets the audio file stand on its own, separate from the website, if needed). I save this as a WAV file from the QuickTime browser plug-in, then add it to the speaker’s audio file in QuickTime Pro.

I export each speaker’s audio file as an AIFF file (22 kHz, 16 bit, mono), then load all of the AIFF files into iTunes where I add textual information (which will become ID3 tags), convert the files to 24 kbps mono MP3 file, and export.

The files then get uploaded to the Commission’s website, entries are added to the database of audio submissions, and the page for each individual meeting, as well as the index of all submissions gets automatically updated.