CNET: Clubhouse Will Let You Create Your Own Curated House. “Clubhouse is rolling out a feature that will allow you to create your own curated ‘house’ within the app, Clubhouse co-founder and CEO Paul Davison said in a series of tweets Thursday.”
Social Media Examiner: Twitter Spaces: A Live Audio Guide for Marketers. “Plan to launch your own Twitter space? Wondering how it all works? In this article, you’ll get a complete primer for Twitter Spaces so you can master everything from hosting and joining to promoting and analyzing audio events.” If you want to market with it, fine, but putting that aside this is a thorough overview of how Twitter Spaces works.
Ars Technica: Winamp, the best MP3 player of the 1990s, just got a major update. “… last week, for the first time in four years, Radionomy released a new version of Winamp. The release notes for Winamp 5.9 RC1 Build 1999 say that the update represents four years of work across two separate development teams, delayed in between by the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Informationsdienst Wissenschaft: Big data on small languages: Release of the DoReCo online database. “On July 29, linguists working all over the world will gather in Berlin at Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft to celebrate the online release of the DoReCo data base, which provides access to audio recordings from more than 50 languages, along with their transcriptions, translations, and detailed linguistic analyses. Admission to the hybrid event is free, but registration is required.”
Ars Technica: New Windows Media Player app travels back in time, gains the ability to rip CDs. “In March, Microsoft enabled audio CD playback in the new version of Media Player, something that the old version had supported for pretty much as long as it had existed. And now, Microsoft is rolling out support for CD ripping in the new version of Media Player, presumably so that we can all convert our old Weezer and Matchbox 20 CDs into files we can copy over to our iPods and Zunes.”
University of Maryland: Who Owns the Sounds and Images of Native People’s Pasts?. “The last known fluent speaker of the tribe’s native Western dialect died in 2010, and the remaining tribal citizens–who traditionally don’t count their members but are estimated to number about 350 speak an amalgam of Ahtna’s Western and Central dialects. Audio recordings of Western Ahtna exist, but many are kept in mainstream archives that don’t belong to the Chickaloon tribe. Now, two University of Maryland faculty members are part of a new effort to bring those recordings, and other pieces of history, back to the Native people who lived the stories within them.”
Bandcamp Daily: Field Recordings are Music, Material, and Method. “That a field recording is a document, preserving sound from a place in both geography and time, is fundamental. However, the field recording concept is not only a genre of its own but also a method that can be incorporated into all existing and conceivable genres; a bird call can remain a bird call, or it can be made into material that becomes a part of a large audio creation, of any kind and in any style.”
MakeUseOf: 4 Free Sites and Extensions for Online Text-to-Speech Tools. “There are a whole host of different benefits that you can achieve with text-to-speech, no matter who you are or what you’re doing. But downloading various programs onto your computer just to give text-to-speech a try can be a bit of a daunting task. Fortunately, there are plenty of online services that allow you to achieve the same functionality as many text-to-speech services without having to worry about any downloads.”
MakeUseOf: The 11 Best Places to Find Royalty-Free Sound Effects for Your YouTube Videos. “When making YouTube videos, you need to ensure that you have the right to use particular sound effects. Many websites allow you to download royalty-free sound effects, but not all sites are created equal. This article introduces the best places to find royalty-free sound effects for your YouTube videos.”
WIRED: The Future of Slack Looks a Lot Like Zoom. “Last June, the popular workplace chat app Slack introduced Huddles, an audio-only feature designed to replicate the real-life thing. It was an immediate hang space, launched easily from within a Slack channel or a direct message. And it has been, according to Slack, a hit.”
New-to-me, from Current: How ‘This Way Out’ is preserving its collection of historic audio from the LGBTQ movement . “The collection reflects the technical evolution of radio production. It is divided between reel-to-reel tapes from 1988 to 2000 that are held in the Pacifica Radio Archives on-site and off-site storage facilities and digital files from 2000 to present, which have been saved on various digital storage devices, including Jaz discs and external hard drives sequestered in producer’s closets.”
Search Engine Journal: LinkedIn Expands Audio Events To All Users. “LinkedIn is expanding audio-only live events, first introduced in January in a beta test, to all users who have Creator Mode turned on. Audio-only live events are LinkedIn’s answer to the success of apps like Clubhouse, and features like Twitter Spaces.”
Engadget: Clubhouse lays off some employees amid strategic shift. “Clubhouse has laid off some of its employees, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. It’s unclear exactly how many staff the company let go, but at least some now-former workers left voluntarily to pursue opportunities outside of Clubhouse. Among one of the more high-profile departures was Nina Gregory, a former National Public Radio editor who joined the company to head up its news partnerships initiative. Clubhouse also lost its community and international leads.”
NewsWise: Direct sound printing is a potential game-changer in 3D printing, according to Concordia researchers. “Most 3D printing methods currently in use rely either on photo (light)- or thermo (heat)-activated reactions to achieve precise manipulation of polymers. The development of a new platform technology called direct sound printing (DSP), which uses soundwaves to produce new objects, may offer a third option.”
Library of Congress: New Article Explores Preservation and Access to Two Historical Literary Audio Archives. “Following the presentation and great enthusiasm about working with one another, the same colleagues–along with Marcus Nappier from the Digital Content Management Section–were invited to publish a longer article, ‘Eighty years of literary audio archives at the Library of Congress: Preserving collections from the physical to digital,’ that outlined the rich history of the audio archives, and provided more details on the the digital preservation workflows to make these resources available on loc.gov and the digital preservation practices ensuring the longevity of these assets.”
