Tools for Audio Content Development
Creation of audio can be addressed in terms of obtaining, editing, and putting the audio into courseware, in much the same information structure as for graphics just above.
Most audio for courseware, excepting in special courses and for special effects, is voice and is created from scratch. For this to be done electronically and digitally (which seems to be best), a computer with sound card, microphone, speakers, and some kind of recording and playback software is needed. An inexpensive editor such as SoundForge-XP can greatly assist not only in recording and playback, but also in editing, including increasing volume, cutting out long silences, and cutting out or splicing in short segments into an audio sequence. A tool such as SoundForge is probably sufficiently easy to use so as not to require much special training or special technical support, but properly setting up a computer with sound card, microphone, and speakers may well require special technical support.
With audio, and possibly with graphics, it becomes advisable to stream the media for faster transmission and decreased bandwidth requirements.
For our purposes, steaming is a process through which media files are compressed for faster transmission and playback through special players (browser plug-ins); synchronization of media can also be facilitated through streaming. In order for a media file to be streamable, it must be converted to a special format, and it must be put into a streaming system including a streaming server. In this paper, the process of converting media to a special streamable format and sending it to a streaming system will be considered, but the actual streaming system including streaming server, which requires considerable technical expertise, will not be considered. Streaming will be discussed in terms of RealNetworks related tools, with which the author is most familiar; similar tools from Microsoft and Apple and other vendors are also available.
Some sound editors such as SoundForge will allow saving files in various formats, including the common .wav format which is not streamable, and the .ra and .rm formats which are. Other tools such as RealProducer (from RealNetworks) can convert .wav files to streamable formats.