Re: [Audacity-devel] Audacity in educational programme

[Shane M. <smu...@um...>]

Tormod,

Others may be able to give you more information, but here are some
answers:

Audacity is licensed under the GNU "General Public License" (GPL),
meaning essentially that you can distribute the application to whomever
you wish, and may even charge money for it, as long as you distribute
the source code or a written offer to make this source code available on
request. Don't take this interpretation as legal advice: read the
license and/or consult your attorney if you want to understand your
obligations better.

 Using Audacity in an educational setting is an excellent idea, because
it is not only free for use without onerous strings attached, the
availability of source code allows it to be customized for specific
purposes, and its cross-platform nature enables you to use without
requiring a single platform. 

More responses below:

> Our questions are:
> - Would it be apppropriate to enclose an Audacity installatin file 
> (.exe) and documentation on the course CD as well as the web page?
Yes, as long as you abide by the licensing terms found in the GPL

> - Should we choose version 1.0.0 or 1.1.0 (Windows)?
1.0 is more stable, but 1.1 has more features and multi-lingual
support.  It is definitely 'beta' quality, and may have problems we
haven't tracked down yet.  Of course, which you choose depends on which
you wish to support, and you should do your own testing to determine how
comfortable you are supporting whichever version you choose. Also, it
depends on when you wish to do this: we may have a much more stable 1.1
branch by the time you want to release your software packages

 Because of the stability issues, your best bet is to stick with 1.0,
unless there are some features you definitely need that aren't available
there. If you want to localize 1.0 to the Norwegian tongue, it should be
fairly easy to find a local programmer who would go through the source
code and translate the strings for you. If you provide a translation
table, you may even be able to hire or otherwise convince one of the
current developers to help you out. If you want to localize 1.1, this
can be done without any programming skills: you would simply need
someone who is bilingual. Visit our translation pages on the website to
find out more.

> - Do you have any experience in large-scale use of this software in 
> Windows environments?
Audacity is currently on of the most popular downloads on sourceforge
and also quite popular on cnet's download.com.  Over half a million
copies of the windows version have been downloaded, and so it is
becoming fairly widely used.

> - Do you know other educational institutions that have experience in 
> using Audacity as their main audio tool?
There are a few people around that have been attempting to use Audacity
in their educational settings, for a variety of purposes. One course
uses it for linguistic analysis (see
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~tmintz/275/Waveforms/waveform_hw.pdf ), and
others have looked at it for foreign-language instruction.  Someone else
may be able to give you the contact information of such institutions.

> - What is expected in return? I know that developments of the 
> software and documentation should be open to all, but since this is a 
> defined educational programme (sold to schools in Norway), it might 
> be a problem to meet these requirements 100%. Maybe a solution could 
> be that direct translations of the documentation are made avaliable - 
> but not all the material deriving from this?
As long as you abide by the terms of the GPL, nothing is required in
return.  If you do any translations of documentation or tutorials, or
write new tutorials/documentation, we would love it if you would place
them in the public domain or under a free license and add them to the
project (for translations, you may be required to license them under the
GPL).  Of course, this would benefit you as well, because it would
reduce your maintenance costs.

> I emphasize that we have not yet decided what software to introduce.
> This choice could effect the educational software standard in Norway, 
> so we feel responsible to carry this out carefully. The choice of 
> software will be made looking at both quality, versatility and 
> availability (price & software future outlooks).

There are definitely some purposes for which Audacity (currently) isn't
a great solution, but they are often very special cases where high-end
or custom software is currently better. As a general-purpose solution to
having an easy-to-use computer-based audio recorder that can be deployed
across an entire institution without worrying about licensing fees,
Audacity is without peer.

If you can construct a list of functions that you need your recorder to
perform, we can better help you determine whether Audacity will suit
your needs.

Stm...