[Wikipedia-l] A place for audio recordings of books/texts?

[Ray Saintonge]

Stephen Forrest wrote:

>Hello all,
>
>Spurred by some brief experiments with recording pronunciations on
>Commons, I am interested (at least conceptually) in making free audio
>recordings (licence GFDL, format .ogg) of various important historical
>texts or literary works which are now free (public domain or
>otherwise).
>
>I suspect there is appetite among volunteers for such a project, and
>so I'm wondering whether there is a place for such things in the
>Wikimedia world.  (I wouldn't be surprised if this had been discussed
>before, though I can't find a reference to it.)
>
>Some natural choices are:
>
>Wikisource:
>Pro: Focus is on free-content versions of important historical texts
>or literary works.
>Con: Mandate seems to be only for text, and there is apparently a 5 MB
>limit per file.
>
We haven't really had any discussion about hosting this type of file on 
Wikisource, although I don't really forsee anyone having objections.  I 
do support the file size limit because slow browsers have difficulty 
downloading the files, and editing them can be nearly impossible. 

I did a quick look at some OTR (Old Time Radio) files of the "Boston 
Blackie" show, and these do run at about 5 Mb for a half-hour show in 
mp3 format.  How do .ogg files compare for file size?

>Commons:
>Pro: Many sound files, and file size limit is larger (20 MB).
>Con: Unsure if it's appropriate for this.  Commons is intended for
>shared media resources across Wikimedia projects, and I can't see how
>(for example) the Catalan Wiktionary would need an audio version of
>Chapter 7 of Wuthering Heights.  Existing sound files on the Commons
>are all quite short.
>
>Right now I'm leaning towards using the Commons.  Any comments about
>this, either about the Commons as a proposed place, or about the idea
>in general?
>
>Lastly, would anyone happen to know of any existing archives of free
>(as in free-libre) audio recordings available online?
>  
>
It would take a bit of research to find out what's available.  Speaking 
only for OTR files, many thousands of these are available cheap on CD.  
The claim is that the copyrights have expired on these, although I have 
not yet taken steps to verify this.  I have nevertheless wondered in the 
context of wikisource whether there was any easy way to transcribe these 
so that the scripts could be made available through Wikisource.

Ec