By Michael Busch
During the last year several Literacy Bridge volunteers have been working on a software application called the Audio Content Manager (ACM). The iTunes-like application is a perfect companion to the Talking Book, as it helps nonprofits keep track of all their Talking Book recordings.
Imagine a nonprofit that uses Talking Books to serve thousands of people with information about maternal health, HIV/AIDS prevention, soybean production tips, and livestock disease control. This nonprofit will create audio messages in each category, and each of these messages will need versions in several different languages. The ACM allows that nonprofit to organize and find exactly what they need so that they can load Talking Books with the applicable messages in the right languages. It also provides them with statistical information so they can learn which of their existing recordings are most popular.
The Talking Book is most useful when it’s loaded with lots of good audio content. To present all that content in an intuitive and efficient way to the user, all audio pieces are categorized by a taxonomy of important topics, such as Agriculture, Health, Education, etc. Additionally, Literacy Bridge aims to make creation and categorization of audio content child’s play, too: local health organizations should be able to create content for Talking Books themselves.
The ACM presents the content categories as a navigable tree, which allows expanding category nodes to see their subcategories. The main window of the ACM user interface (UI) shows a list of recordings by their titles, authors, durations, and other useful information.
The collection of metadata fields was inspired by DAISY, a standard for creating audio books for people who have visual disabilities. All those fields are editable from within ACM’s UI.
Two features make finding content in ACM very easy: First, a live search filters the audio items as the user types — this works on every supported metadata field. Second, the category tree shows the number of audio pieces contained in each category, which is also updated when search terms are entered. For example, if the user enters “abc” in the search box, the main table would hide all audio items that don’t contain “abc” in any field, and the navigation tree would show the number of pieces with “abc” in each category. The user could then select a category which has one or more items to further filter out all other, non-selected categories.
One of our main goals was to make copying audio files to the Talking Book device as easy and efficient as possible. Therefore, ACM supports importing all common audio formats with just one mouse click: simply drag & drop one or more audio files from your computer’s desktop onto the desired category in the navigation tree, and ACM does the rest: It converts the clip to a format the Talking Book can play, parses the metadata (e.g. MP3 tags) and moves the files to the desired category.
If you connect a Talking Book to a computer, the ACM recognizes the device and shows it in a device list. If the user clicks on the device, ACM presents a list of all audio items located on the device, which can then easily be imported to ACM. Similarly, audio items can be exported from ACM to the device via drag and drop. Also automatically, the tool imports statistics the Talking Books gathered, such as copy and play counts, and presents them along with the audio items’ metadata.
Another noteworthy feature of the ACM is the fully translated UI into three languages: English, French, and German. Furthermore, since we developed the tool with multi-language support in mind from the beginning, the ACM will be able to support more languages in the future.
We’re happy that after just one year, the ACM is already a very helpful tool that works hand-in-hand with the Talking Book. We have big plans for it, and would love other volunteers joining us in our efforts. It’s fun to work on this interesting technology with nice people to create something truly meaningful! Please contact us if you would like to contribute!
The developers who worked on ACM are Sven Schade, Mathias Koehnke, Chris Schmid and Michael Busch.
Literacy Bridge
