I’m in charge of an archive of about 1000 hours of interviews with native Hawaiian speakers that we are currently digitizing. It is one of the largest and most valuable audio archive available for any indigenous language.
We do have security concerns regarding this. We realize that making the audio completely copy-proof is impossible, and we’re not sure to what lengths we want to go to protect them. We may decide that minimal security is necessary if any at all. We might want to only stream, but then again we might want to allow downloads. As yet to be determined. We’ve looked at RealAudio, QuickTime, MP3, and in the desire to be open-minded and investigate all possible solutions, I want to see what Windows Media can offer in this area. Is there anyone at MS that would be willing to talk with us a bit to see if Win Media would be a better format for this valuable archive?
I should mention that our programs are very Mac centric because of the amount of support Apple has given us over the years, and the fact that they have baked in Hawaiian support (keyboard, characters, date formatting, sorting routines) into OS X. I’ve had some conversations with people at MS for getting this kind of support in Windows, but so far no commitments on it.
We want to link these files to a searchable database and allow our students to listen to any portion that they like immediately (no scrolling or searching). I have previously created Usertalk and PHP scripts that automated this. We entered a time for each event entry in the database. The CDML in the FileMaker database created a link, sent the file name and time data as a post arg to the script, which created RA meta files on the fly and allows us to listen from that point in the file – no scrolling.
Here is an example record from the database, though the links to the archive do not currently work. If you look at them carefully there are are post args in the links that specify the file name and start times for each topic that we wanted to be individually linked:
http://www.olelo.hawaii.edu/keola/klh.html
Any thoughts are appreciated.
