Educators have been asking when the free test of blabber-to-video conversion ends, so that they can plan their Blabberize use around the features available.
Well, we’re not ready to release our membership features, but we can shoulder the cost of videos until June, which hopefully gets most of our educator users to the end of the current school year. So go make videos, and, if you get a second, let us know what you’re doing with them!
The microphone should be working, try it out.
We recently tried to upgrade our recording server hoping to clear up some long standing issues where our server ended needing us to restart it by hand every couple of days.
So we installed the newest version of everything and tested it late at night and went to sleep thinking everything was fine. Our tests seemed to run okay so we felt confident things were alright. The next morning when real traffic hit the site the recording server not only broke but went nuts. It did things that created a whole lot of mess for us. So we took the site down again tonight and rolled things back to a version that we know is stable and hopefully will not create more issues but we’re trying to stay vigilant on any issues that arise. Please shoot us a message if you notice anything that isn’t right.
Are you getting the “Blocked Ports” error when trying to record from Microphone? This error shows up when the Blabber creator can’t reach our recording server so that it can stream the audio that you record from your microphone live to our server. Fortunately there are some work arounds for getting your audio to our server.
You can Call-In your audio by using the call in audio function. When you click the call in audio option you’ll be presented with a toll free number (Normal Rates apply!) and an ID number that you need to enter when prompted. Then you’ll be asked to record your audio and instantly you’ll see it working with your blabber. This option usually works without issue.
The other option is to Upload your audio. Before you can upload your audio though, you need to record it and save it. Windows has sound recorder available for recording and Macs have simple recorder for recording. We like to use a free program called audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/) which runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. You record your audio and save it to your computer and then upload your audio by pressing the upload audio button on the recording step.
There are a lot of benefits of recording your audio and then uploading. For example adding effects and filters to change your voice. Also having the ability to record your audio before hand allows you to create cleaner recording and easily make multiple takes. Also if you want to apply the same sound to many blabbers you can upload your audio to each blabber you make.
Let us know if you have any issues and we’ll do our best to help you.
A classroom full of talented and intelligent MCs showed off their lyrical skills and their amazing intellect by creating some Blabberize Raps about photosynthesis! Check them out:
http://5daled2010.wikispaces.com/message/list/Photosynthesis%20Raps
Use the video conversion feature to edit your blabbers in programs like windows movie maker and have conversations with your Blabbers!
We’re finally ready to test blabber-to-video conversion. For the next two weeks, all video conversions will be free — so help us test the system, and use the ‘contact’ link at the bottom of the page let us know how it goes — if it works, if the videos we give you fit in your favorite programs, and what sort of adventures you and you blabbers have when they’re off away from home.
( By the way, you make the videos by clicking “I want this on video!” when viewing a blabber you’ve made, or the “Convert to Video” link in My Stuff. Go try it, it’ll be fun!)
Soon, we’ll be offering premium features for purchase — and we want to make sure the site stays useful while we do it, particularly for teachers!
I know this is going to be a little scary, talking about adding payment options to a site you’ve gotten used to being free. Well, what’s been free will stay free — you can still make blabbers and embed them in other websites, or let friends view them on our site — and we’re absolutely dedicated to keeping our site useful to educators. So don’t worry.
Here’s what we’re doing:
We’re trying to get the site to pay for itself, and that means having people pay for the bandwidth they use. For a single user (even a teacher with one account for multiple students), costs should be pretty low; for us, though, potentially footing the bill for millions of users is a little beyond our means. So, we’ll soon be offering, for a small fee, some brand new features, and some variations on what we already offer.
First off, we’ll be restricting free blabbers so that they’re ’smaller’, bandwidth-wise — fewer scenes and shorter audio. We’ll then have affordable premium membership options with much higher limits (only present so someone can’t make an infinitely large blabber and crash the system / run us out of business). We’re aiming to start with 1 minute 30 seconds per scene limits for free, 5 minutes per scene for premium, and we’ll adjust them from there as we get feedback from you folks.
Second, we’ll be offering blabber-to-video conversion at a small fee. We have a section in the FAQ explaining more about why blabbers aren’t already videos, but the important part is that doing the conversion lets you download a plain old video file that can be loaded by video editing programs, embedded into slideshows, or uploaded to other websites. In other words, after conversion, the blabber is yours to do with as you will! Premium memberships will include a good number of video conversions.
Third, we’ll be limiting the amount of data transfer off-site embeds can consume, which we’re calling embed bandwidth. We’ve actually always been limiting this, but now we’ll let you buy more if you’re consuming a lot — so if you’re using a blabber as the centerpiece of a high-traffic website, your traffic won’t run us out of business or break your blabbers. Premium memberships come with higher monthly allotments of embed bandwidth.
You’ll be able to buy the video conversion and embed bandwidth separately from memberships, and in bulk packs to make them even cheaper, but we’re aiming for our premium memberships to be the best value; premium memberships not only let you make longer blabbers with more scenes, and come with video conversions and a higher monthly embed bandwidth allowance, but also let you remove ads from the site!
So let us know what you think!
Keep an eye out for news on changes and updates to the site!
I’ve been working on this problem for two days and I think we’ve reached a point where it’s workable. Upload sound now has better mouth movement to audio. Try it out and let us know what you think. We’re constantly trying to improve things. Here’s a blabber I made and uploaded a sound bite from a movie.
Moments after putting up the new updated upload code someone used it to great effect:
The sound quality and mouth movement isn’t as good as it could be with the Audio Upload feature. So if you’ve tried it and found that we’ve done a bad job of matching up the mouth with the voice. Well… we noticed it too and are working to fix it.
As of now Call-In-Audio is the best way to get high quality audio and mouth sync into the system.
And course microphone recording works well too. But that depends on your microphone. Macbooks seem to have great mics. Most desktop and PC laptops don’t have the best recording capabilities. My laptop a DV6700 has issues with the microphone and I’ve been fiddling with the settings for months to get it to a level that I’m happy with. Course I’m also a perfectionist because I know what a really good blabber looks and sounds like having made and listened to god knows how many blabbers.
Let me know if you have any issues. We’re working on making the Upload Audio better. I’ll post an update here soon as Alex and I get it solid.