[Audacity-devel] Audacity workshop on Sugar OS

[Sean L. <se...@lp...>]

Hello Audacity Team,

I am looking at presenting some of the potential uses for Audacity on the
OLPC XO computers and sugar system at an up coming Pacific Chapter Internet
Society Conference.

Lately I have been discussing with people the potential to use Audacity as a
way of helping communities create content, and distribute recorded programs
and music to community radio stations.

It seems that the OLPC or (Sugar labs) developers have taken the idea so far
and have not really been able fully integrate Audacity into the Sugar
system.

Versions of the program will run fine, however for Sugar users there are a
few things that could be looked at which would help streamline the process
of using Audacity as a way of creating community media.

The first thing is the ability to save an Audacity file onto a USB or SD
card. The XO computer is a solid state net book and has at most 4 GB
storage, and closer to 500mb - 1GB on average. For the big files that
Audacity generates some external media support will probably be needed. At
this stage I am confronted with permission errors if I try to write to my
flash drive, I know this is not a problem with the drive or Sugar because I
have Sugar writing to the drive without any difficulty?

I am also looking at how mp3 support would help in terms of creating widely
accessible formats, I appreciate that OGG is superior in many ways including
accessibility but it seems that without mp3 support exporters are limited to
computer hardware in many ways. It is a shame that the computer terminal
should monopolize the products that audacity is capable of exporting.

I have had some advice about LAME and the Fedora repositories but I am
thinking about how this can resolved by the average sugar user.

Finally the mesh networking between the XO computers allows great support
for peer to peer collaboration. Currently applications can be shared with a
neighborhood and be worked on remotely, Audacity support for this feature
would represent a great step forward in utilizing the potential of an
empowering technology in the hands of young people.

Thanks for any time or thoughts you can give me on this, it is appreciated.