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Smart iTunes playliss help with language lessons
Authored by: monickels on Dec 16, '05 08:01:45AM

This post seems like an obvious tip to me, but let me add to it. Language lessons annoy me because they are filled with long pauses where I'm supposed to repeat the words being said. Problem is, I commute via subway in New York City. I do not intend to start muttering nonsense in Thai or Bengali on the train--there are enough wackos already without me adding to the mix. Plus, in some cases I already know how to pronounce the language. I'm just adding to or reinforcing my existing vocabularly. So the pauses are just time-wasters.

What I've done is use Audio Hijack to record all of the lessons for a language in order to a single bookmarkable AAC file (which resolves the "where was I?" problem). But I also use AJ's "silence monitor" feature to remove most of the pauses. AJ listens for pause of a given length (the default is 2 seconds) and a given low decibel level and when it finds them, it deletes them. If you set the pause length to one second or greater, this can cut the length of a language lesson by one-third to a half.

It works pretty well, but you'll have to play with it to find settings that work for you, since different language lessons have different background levels for the "silent" parts. Try AJ's analog and digital settings both. You might use the VST Effect MDA SpecMeter plugin (which is free) to measure the decibel level of "silent" parts of a lesson in order to know where to set it. ("Silent" is in quotes because there's almost always sound there, just no talking or music.)

The only thing about this shortening of lessons that I've had problems with is that in some cases words beginning with an S sound are clipped minutely at the very beginning. It wasn't a problem for languages I already knew pretty well, but it would be for ones that were brand-new to me. I think this problem might be resolved by tweaking the S-range of the audio spectrum upwards to be more pronounced (using one of the equalizer plugins), but I did not try that.

I don't know how this compares to the newer iPod's ability to play audiobooks at an accelerated pace.

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Double-Tongued Word Wrester: a growing dictionary of old and new words from the fringes of English.



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