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by Josh Baltzell.
Original Post: Podcasting Sound-Seeing Ideas for incorporating images
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Lately on the Daily Source Code podcast by Adam Curry he has been talking about and doing “Sound-seeing”. What it comes down to is that he is walking around and recording as he moves. This is a cool idea to me as long as everyone can do something with similar quality. The only problem is that I doubt most people can produce a good enough narrative to really comprehend the environment around the recorder. Video would be cool, but really it is not needed since we don't always need to see what is going on.
My suggestion would be to use a digital camera (preferably a really small one that can last long enough to take quite a few pics) and take a picture every time the scenery changes. If you stop in Starbucks for 30 mins then just take one as you walk in and after you sit down. This will just give the person consuming the media an idea of where you are. I think that is important since you are trying to bring them along on a little trip through wherever you are.
So here is how I see everything working. You begin recording on your portable device and you note the actual time when you begin to record. Now you can take pics with your camera and use the creation date on the file to build a time line of when you took the pic compared to when you were recording.
Now that you have your data you can process that and use it to build a file in one of several ways.
1: You could use flash and have the audio in MP3. The file size would be small, but it would never play on a portable player.
2: You could write the file as a movie. The file size should not be bad since the screen will just be displaying a static image most of the time. Some super high end players can play video, but not too many.
3: You could use a program to process your audio file and add a certain tone to each moment during the recording that you took a photo. If you did it this way then you could let people follow along if they like, but you would still have a plain MP3 that anyone could use. The other cool thing that some people might be able to do is use their iPod Photo with this setup. I assume that you can browse photos with music playing, but I have not had my hands on one. If you did this you could release the images and let people copy them so they can see your pics on their iPod Photo display while listening.
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