I’m excited to share the first tangible results of the Hyper Audio project, which I now lead at Mozilla. Before you read any further, please spend a few minutes with the demo and leave your feedback – however mundane – in the comments:

What does it do?

The HTML5 player plays 2 files (.ogg files with .mp3 fallback): the original, danish-language radio show, and an English version. The links on the right spawn as the player progresses, as do the footnotes. Each link is timestamped. This means you can use them as chapters – click the small audio symbol, which will send you to the exact point in the timeline. But the killer feature of the demo is the linked transcript at the bottom of the page. In the words of radio futurist James Cridland:

This offers disaggregated audio and a transcript. It offers translation into English from the slightly less accessible Danish. Using HTML5, it also shows you the translation alongside the original language as it plays. Highlight a part of the transcript, and you can tweet that part automatically. It’s a very impressive and strong example of what’s possible with new technologies.

How did we do it?

Mark Boas  worked tirelessly on the demo, and has written up a great post that outlines the technology and procedure behind the demo. My workflow was this:

- Anders shared the session file, source interviews, in a stripped-down version, with me. He also shared the document containing his script, notes and research.

- I submitted the source interview to Castingwords. The transcript arrived 6 days later, and cost 34 USD.

- Ran the clear-text script through Universal Subtitles and asked friends to translate, while cross-referencing with the original script (in danish).

- Edited up the session in Hindenburg and downloaded the podcast version to compare with, and, after some work, got everything in sync.

- created a stub based on a previous popcorn demo, with the help of Ben Moscowitz. Added Popcorn based on the notes and audio. This was a labour-intensive task, and needed many corrections, but also a great learning experience for me. With time, the Butter App will make this a lot easier for audio. Also, during the procedure the Hindenburg team wrote a parser for the editing app which may, in the future, allow journalists to add Popcorn as part of their workflow. See this slideshow for more on Hindenburg Popcorn integration.

- Ordered a transcript from 3play. This formed the basis for the linked transcript.  See Mark Boas post as to how we generated the danish version.

- Once the demo was taking shape, I asked Christian Valentiner at DR to help design the demo to look and feel closer to a DR page thank our stub. He did an amazing job in very little time.

- Polishing, 15 iterations, and we were (almost) done – we still fix bugs and listen to feedback!

Why?

The goal of this demo was to “open up” Harddisken, a brilliant danish tech radio show, and to show how opting for “open” can help reach an international audience and engage with listeners in new ways. In short, the intention was to create a first, awesome demonstration of the Hyper Audio concept.

The first tenet of The Cathedral and the Bazaar is

“Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch”

I outlined my itches with radio in a previous post on Hyper Audio. I got the idea for this demo from conversations with former colleagues at Harddisken and in particular an email exchange between my (new) colleague Tristan Nitot  and host and reporter Anders Høeg Nissen:

“Hey Tristan

You may remember that we did a pretty long interview back in December – and now I’ve finally gotten around to actually broadcasting it (..) most of it’s in Danish, but should you want to listen to the bits where you talk (or listen to the whole thing and hone your language skillz :-) – you can download it here (the Mozilla stuff is in the last 20 minutes or so).”‘

If we break this down, there are a number of itches to scratch here:

1: A long interview of which only parts are used.This is frustrating both for the interviewee and the interviewer.

2: Tristan would probably never listen to this as; and if he did, he would not be able to appreciate his own wisdom because the show is in Danish :)

3: Navigating in the standard flash player is painful – chances are Tristan would give up (especially since he uses a Mac, which to this day works badly with DRs player).

4: A google search for “Tristan Nitot Harddisken” will not find the audio for Tristan (or you) in case he loses the link. Try for yourself!

I’m pleased with the final result and thankful for the amazing support we received from Mozilla, DR and Harddisken, and not least the Popcorn team. Special thanks to Barry Threw for providing support on all stages of the project, and to all my other friends who helped along the way.