My apologies if this has been repeated elsewhere (I did a search and couldn’t find anything). I was thinking today, that though it might be difficult to implement, it’d be very useful for uploaders/users to be able to ‘timestamp’ the texts (I’m not sure if that is the correct term). What I mean is some way of connecting the text to specific times in the audio track (by inserting a marker, say), so that if the learner wanted to repeat a certain section, they could do so by clicking within the text, and not needing to play around with the audio player.
@faircall - While that would be a nice feature it is actually a lot of manual work to sync up the text with the audio as markers would have to be added to each word or sentence to match locations. Because of the sheer volume of lessons on LingQ and the time that would be required to implement something like this, it is just not feasible. It would be nice though!
@faircall You can do something similar using the audio editor Audacity. Takes a bit of work, but you can read the text and listen along with Audacity, mark in Audacity where you want to end a section, then listen over and over again to the same selection. I insert silence between sections so I can find them easily again.
You probably already know about Audacity, but if not, it’s freeware.
Yeah it would be a great feature but totally impractical to implement.
Donhamiltontx - Audacity is a great program. I’ll just add that it’s free and open source, not freeware, which is a software concept out of the propriety world.
“open source” doesn’t usually mean much to a non-programmer other than “it’s free”.
I’ve always thought this sort of feature would be awesome as well, it would really help with pronunciation training, and every flashcard could have the lesson audio right in it, but of course, its a pipe dream, as the manual work involved would be a nightmare for content providers.
Doing this manually would be a mess, but…
There are programs for aligning bilingual parallel texts. Likewise, aligning a text recognized from speech with an original one would be even easier. That’s the way you get the markers. The use of speech recognition could result in automation of the process we are talking about. Technologically, there are just two technologies to buy and one gap to fill, but I don’t believe it’s going to be implemented for LingQ in any time soon.
Yeah fair enough, I suspected it would probably be too much engineering time. Thanks Don for the suggestion, I’ll try that!
Okay, 5 minutes later, I can assure everyone Audacity is awesome. You can just highlight a section you want to repeat- works a treat.
@odiernod, I know, but it’s good to at least get the name out there. Maybe some curious people will check it out. 