Friday, August 03, 2007

Audio on Facebook

Yesterday I got back from a great week away, helping at a Christian Camp for teenagers. Everyone is on facebook nowadays, so of course a facebook groups was created, and I wanted to add all the talks that we had recorded to the facebook group so people could listen to them again if they wanted.

Unfortunately, a few days before, the facebook Audio application was removed for copyright violation reasons

Now the simplest thing would just be to host them on my own server, and then, post a link on the discussion board, but I thought I'd be clever, and I thought I'd detail my adventures with this post.

First I tried posting them as video - after all, audio is just video without pictures, right? Nope. Facebook video needs a recognised file type.

Next I thought that I could create a video, by using a single photo, and the audio as background. I found a free application "Slide show movie maker" which would do precisely this (it's designed for producing slide shows of pictures, with pretty music background), but in the end I could only get it to work with the PCM/WAV codec, so the movie was huge and it would have taken hours to upload to facebook video. Sigh.

I suspect I could do it with a commercial Adobe flash video producer or similar, but I got bored. I uploaded the audio to my own server, and posted a link in the discussion group.

Maybe facebook Audio will come back in a few days - before bandwidth/storage is too high on my host. Unless anyone has any better ideas?