[Lexicog] EasyRecorder for Toolbox (adding sound recordings to Toolbox files)

[Norbert Rennert]

Hello Marvyn and others,

Toolbox is a good program to use for making wordlists and dictionaries. 
It also has the capability to play back sound recordings. These 
recordings can be anywhere on your computer, but it is better to put 
them into a subfolder where your wordlist or dictionary file is located.

A sample Toolbox record could look like this:
\lx headword
\ps n
\ge english gloss here
\gn another language gloss here
\de english definition here
\dn another language definition here
\sf media\sample.wav (this would point to a sound file named 
'sample.wav' in a folder named 'media' which resides in the folder where 
the dictionary data file is stored)

In Toolbox, pressing F4 or shift+F4 plays back the sound file referenced 
in the \sf field.
In the past it has been a fairly tedious process to record words and 
label them individually. Recently, a colleague of mine developed a 
program called EasyRecorder that will read Toolbox files and record 
speech for each record just by using the arrow keys of your keyboard. 
The program reads your data file and displays all the words in your 
dictionary like the browse view in Toolbox. You can do some 
customization of which fields to display. You must also specify where 
you want to store the sound files. Pressing the right arrow key starts 
the recording, pressing the left arrow key stops the recording. Pressing 
the down arrow moves the focus to the next word or record. When the left 
arrow keys gets pressed, recording stops and the program labels the 
sound file with the text in the \ge (English gloss) field (or another 
field can be specified as well). The sound file is saved in the 
specified folder with the name from gloss and the path is entered in the 
\sf (sound file) field of the database. This is about as quick and 
pain-free a method to add sound recordings to Toolbox files as could be 
possible. All you need is a microphone and a computer that can record 
sound. There are video tutorials on the site. Please note that this 
program is still in an alpha state of development, but it does what it 
promises to do already. I'm sure the developer would love to hear about 
bugs, suggestions for improvement, or praises for this awesome utility.

The link to EasyRecorder is:
https://mail.jaars.org/~sheldon_kehler@sil.org/EasyRecorder.html 
<https://mail.jaars.org/%7Esheldon_kehler@sil.org/EasyRecorder.html>
The developers email is: sheldon_kehler at sil.org

Toolbox can be downloaded from:
http://www.sil.org/computing/toolbox/

Hoping that this program will add tons of audio data to textual Toolbox 
databases around the world.

Norbert Rennert

------------------------------------------------------------------------

NORBERT RENNERT
Information Technician
Canada Institute of Linguistics
7600 Glover Road, Langley, BC V2Y 1Y1
t: 604.513.2129 ext. 3956
f: 604.513.2128

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lexicography/attachments/20061213/1720c6e0/attachment.htm>