We looked at Lectopia back when it was still called iLecture and had meetings with Michael Neville of The University of Western Australia, Richard Bennett of Apple and others in 2005. At the time there were several prohibiting factors to us trying a full scale uptake of the system. It is interesting now to read of the acquisition on Monday of the Lectopia software by Anystream, the large US based company specialising in streaming media encoding technology.

Full press release: Anystream Apreso Acquires Lectopia from the University of Western Australia

Next Monday 3rd September Aidan and Caroline will attend a Caledonian Academy Learning Communities Forum here at Glasgow Caledonian University. The forum entitled ‘Student and Staff Perceptions of Web-based Lecture Recording Technologies’ will be led by Dr Rob Phillips from Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. This should be an excellent opportunity for us to hear about recent developments in Australia, and for our team to discuss the recording and curation of lectures with Caledonian Academy staff and other colleagues. We are seeking permission to record the event and will write an event report on this blog.

I picked up this useful little application a few weeks ago, but alas I didn’t spend much time trying it out. It’s essentially a volume normaliser with some black-hat code going on in the background to make sure your podcasts and other audio sound consistent and clear.

The aggressively-named Levelator is free for non-commercial use, and available for Mac and Windows.

MAKE magazine seems to like it:

Audio Podcasting Awesomeness - The Levelator:

Unless you are an audio-fiend who likes to spend hours tweaking your podcast, then you need the levelator. You drag your audio file into the app and it levels the whole thing.

Jake says, One of the biggest frustrations of people who record and edit audio is the amount of time it takes to fix volume level issues. If you record two people, one of them is invariably softer than the other in the mix. You might turn your head away from the microphone to look at a distraction or have the microphone pointed away from the source. This even happens to the pros on occasion. To solve this common frustration, Gigavox created The Levelator. Essentially, the software examines a WAV or AIFF file, looks for volume inconsistencies and fixes them. It’s a bit geekier than that under the hood. The Levelator handles both the gain optimization on a file and RMS normalization to make sure the volume level is consistent. The output is a new file, so you can always go back to the original if you need to. The software runs on both Windows and OS X and is free for personal non-commercial use. While The Levelator can’t do anything to make your podcast more interesting, this is the first tool I’ve ever seen that makes almost anyone sound like they hired a top-notch engineer. - Link

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(Via MAKE Magazine).

The story focuses on the commercial possibilities of this technology, but the immediacy of legally downloading programmes as they are broadcast could be interesting for education too.

Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) developments (UK) - the Register reports that UK radio broadcaster UBC and radio station Heart FM are set to launch a new technology which enables UK radio listeners to immediately download and purchase tracks being broadcast over the radio. According to the article, tracks will cost about £1.25 each, and will be available as two WMA formats, a 32 kbps version and a higher quality 128 kbps file. The article reports that Virgin Mobile’s Lobster DAB-enabled phone will be the first device to offer the technology. The project will launch in beta version in December 2006 and a full commercial launch is expected in Q1 2007.

Full story from The Register - ‘Mobile ‘impulse downloading’ plays live in the new year‘

Via Rights.com news briefing