I’m on a business trip this week. I am working in Colorado for a few days.
While here, I stopped in at the university’s surplus sales barn and had a look through their piles of interesting stuff. I usually try to pick up a new mouse or keyboard while I’m in the area.

It just so happened that they had a box which is used to interface between a PA system like you might find in a hotel conference/convention center, and a telephone. I was able to buy it very cheaply and I think I can make it work as an audio/telephone connection for our radio station.

One of our “rewards” we have been advertising on the fundraising site at indiegogo.com is to have our contributor give a 60 second testimonial about their favorite book. So I have been on the lookout for a way to interface telephone and audio system in order to record these testimonials over the phone.

If this thing works it will have saved us a couple hundred bucks, easy. If it doesn’t work then I’ll throw it into my electronics bone pile and use the parts for a ham radio project someday.

Today we opened an account on Twitter. You can follow us at @wmfhlp.

The crowd-funding thing is interesting. It seems to me like a slam-dunk that 15,000 people out of 300 million would be willing to drop $1 on our project, or almost any given project for that matter.

So the issue comes down to marketing – getting your project in front of the most people and find those folks out there with a spare dollar and enough gumption to click on “contribute now”. Or so it seems.

Our Twitter account will, we hope, add substantially to the number of people who could see our appeal.

We are having a bit of trouble getting Twitter and Facebook to talk to each other. But we will eventually get that worked out. That part is really a convenience for us since it means one entry in Twitter is echoed in Facebook.

The whole new-media thing is exciting, interesting, and sometimes frustrating!

We are continually adding content to our broadcast system library.

First, I find things on Librivox.org that look interesting.  I have been getting a lot of good short-length pieces from a series of anthologies of short poetry and short stories.  And from there I branch out to what sounds interesting to me or I may look up some other works which were performed by a particular volunteer reader.

Each item comes as a zipped collection of .mp3 audio files.

I have a little script which unpacks the zipped collection and then runs the loader program to put all of the .mp3s into our automation system.  The script loads everything into a classification called ‘NEW’.

After that I go through and check out each one.  I trim the beginning and ending.  Most of the items begin with a statement about the Librivox project, so I trim that off.  And most have “end of chapter 1”, stuff at the end, and I trim that off. I classify the selection roughly by type (fiction, poetry, biography…) and by it’s  time-length.  And I try to check the audio level so that it isn’t too loud or too soft.

In some rare cases there will be something about that particular track which makes it difficult to understand.  If it is part of a short-piece anthology I put just that track  into a different classification to look at later.

We have about 1500 items in the library so far.  Most of those are short pieces.  Last night I spent a couple of hours and trimmed and classified about a hundred items.