LibriVox recording on Ubuntu

Henrik · Post by **Henrik** » March 6th, 2006, 5:30 am

Hi,

I heard about your site on the BBC 'In Touch' program. It's great to see these readings placed in the public domain!

I'm just writing to let you know that we plan on including one of your files on our operating system CD. It is a Linux-based system called Ubuntu. You can read more about it here: http://www.ubuntu.com/ I'll probably go with Alice in Wonderland, Ch.1, but suggestions are welcome.

We are quite restricted on disk space on the CD itself, so I've taken the liberty of compressing down the file a bit. I've merged it to mono and encoded it in speex format with a lower sampling rate, but I'll link to the original as well. I think it still sounds fairly good, and the size was reduced from about 10mb to 2.8.

I guess your service is for a general audience, but that blind people will find it esp. useful. We are also trying to improve support in our OS for blind people with our upcomming edition (to be released in April), so this may all be a good match. We are adding a screen reader and screen magnifier to the default install CD.

If you have any questions you can send me a PM or email on henrik AT ubuntu DOT com.

Henrik Nilsen Omma

Also see: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DapperExampleContent https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility

ChipDoc · Post by **ChipDoc** » March 6th, 2006, 5:44 am

Wow, that's GREAT! Thanks for thinking of us, Heinrik. I know that Stephan installed the previous Ubuntu build and he's really happy with it.

It's nice for your users that you included something like Alice too. A lot of folks don't think of anything but music when they consider audio players.

Thanks again for supporting LibriVox. We'll continue to support Ubuntu!

vee · Post by **vee** » March 6th, 2006, 7:47 am

Yay Ubuntu. Our install base here at Hopkins has been growing quite a bit. We're currently still required by the admin to have production servers running Redhat AS, a lot of our desktop and smaller apps are running on Ubuntu. I'll look forward to finding the recording on the next release.

Henrik · Post by **Henrik** » March 6th, 2006, 8:08 am

Hey, it's great that you know of (and even use Ubuntu)! We really should make greater efforts to link free content and free software. I'll certainly prepare some links in connection with this example content package.

thistlechick · Post by **thistlechick** » March 6th, 2006, 8:22 am

My husband says he will install Ubuntu on my old laptop computer tonight! Wheee!!!

raynr · Post by **raynr** » March 6th, 2006, 8:52 am

We use Ubuntu in my office at the University and I already have installed the pre-release of Drapper Drake on my Laptop. The new xgl/compiz desktop is incredible!!!

kri · Post by **kri** » March 6th, 2006, 8:55 am

thistlechick wrote:My husband says he will install Ubuntu on my old laptop computer tonight! Wheee!!!

Perhaps I should try to figure out doing that on my old laptop. It's a piece of crap anyways, and I've long wanted to try a non windows OS.

ChipDoc · Post by **ChipDoc** » March 6th, 2006, 9:33 am

That's an excellent idea, kri. It's probably a piece of crap only because it's running Windows. With a real OS on it, it'd probably run a whole lot better!

Post by **hugh** » March 6th, 2006, 9:36 am

henrik, that's fantastic...that's quite an honour! wonderful. Thanks.

kri · Post by **kri** » March 6th, 2006, 9:36 am

ChipDoc wrote:That's an excellent idea, kri. It's probably a piece of crap only because it's running Windows. With a real OS on it, it'd probably run a whole lot better!

Well, it's also a piece of crap 'cause it only has like...2.1 gig. Although, it's not useless due to that. It's useless due to no working battery. It has to always be plugged in

We'll see what I can do..

However, I never got the ISO burning to work with some of the resources that were presented here before. Otherwise I may need to order a free CD and wait the weeks for it. Plus, I have no idea what I'm doing!! But I guess that's the point, to learn how!

Some day, in the not so near future, I want to build my own computer and put a linux-based OS on it.

kayray · Post by **kayray** » March 6th, 2006, 9:59 am

Henrik, this is so extremely cool and quite an honor!

Thank you :)

Kri -- I think you'll enjoy Linux! xmms is a very nice audioplayer.

HerrSchildkroete · Post by **HerrSchildkroete** » March 6th, 2006, 10:54 am

WoW - Very cool.

And congratulations on Ubuntu. After three months I have yet to edit a single config file. Normally it takes two hours till I feel the need to tweak something

.
Keep up the good work!

Henrik · Post by **Henrik** » March 6th, 2006, 12:42 pm

I'm glad this is being well received

I've put the file up here: http://people.ubuntu.com/~henrik/temp/ so you can listen if you like. I think the 'S' sounds are possibly a bit more tinny than the original, but it sounds reasonable to me (the point being the smaller file size). I'm not sure what sort of player would play speex files on Windows. In ubuntu it plays in totem, rhythmbox, etc.

I should also note that it's not 100% certain that the track will end up on the final CD as space constraints will always be a limiting factor. But at least at this stage I'm putting it in and we'll see. The link to LibriVox will stay in any case.

It should be on Flight 5 (our 5th testing release) out in two weeks or so.

raouf · Post by **raouf** » March 6th, 2006, 2:14 pm

kayray wrote:
Kri -- I think you'll enjoy Linux! xmms is a very nice audioplayer.

If you use xmms then you might be interested to know that the Winamp skins apply also to xmms.

kri · Post by **kri** » March 6th, 2006, 2:18 pm

raouf wrote:
kayray wrote:
Kri -- I think you'll enjoy Linux! xmms is a very nice audioplayer.
If you use xmms then you might be interested to know that the Winamp skins apply also to xmms.

That's really good to know, because I really enjoy the Winamp skin I'm using .