--- Forwarded Message from Bob Majors <[log in to unmask]> ---

>User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/10.1.1.2418
>Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2003 11:20:17 -0700
>Subject: Re: #7126 French in Action audio on intranet?
>From: Bob Majors <[log in to unmask]>
>To: Language Learning and Technology International Information    Forum   <[log in to unmask]>
>In-Reply-To: <[log in to unmask]>

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> Is anyone serving up the French in Action audio (now available as MP3s on CD)
> via an Intranet to their students? I have just gotten a request to do this for
> the fall, but it is not a service I have implemented to offer yet.  I've just
> ordered the CDs and already have a Mac G3 OS X Jaguar server. Can anyone give
> me some set-up pointers before I need to start mucking around to figure it out
> on my own?

Audio CDs (CD-A) can be ripped with QuickTime Player Pro (~$30 from Apple).
For more flexibility, you can get a version of Cleaner Mac 6 from Discreet
(you can probably get an educational price from the right vendor), which
allows batching and if you want, outputting multiple quality levels.  You
need to decide on how you want to compress the audio (what codec, etc.), and
you'll want to do the production on a non-server computer.  The codec(s)
decision will depend on the slowest link you need to serve, but again, you
can have multiple versions.  If you use QuickTime, the multiple versions
even be automatically served, because of capabilities built into QuickTime
(and when you set your web coding correctly).  If you use QuickTime
Streaming Server (part of OSX server) to serve your movies, you need to hint
your movies (easy to do).  Plus you'll want reference movies (actually text
files that are the links that point to the actual QT movies).  If you're
concerned about restricting access, you might look at web authentication
schemes, and also some of the methods mentioned here:

http://developer.apple.com/quicktime/

There's also a very good book, 'QuickTime for the Web for Windows and Mac',
by Apple.  You can probably get everything you need from the docs and the
website; the book might make it easier/faster to get started.

Bob Majors
Language Learning Center
University of Washington