How to Obtain the Multimedia Files in a Manner Suitable for My Website?
Rituraj Kalita
July 2012
July 2012
Digital audio/video files are generated by devices such as cell phones, digital camera and recording devices in PCs. It is impractical to keep a video file in your free website because of its too large size: for that purpose there are websites such as the well-known YouTube, where you may upload your video files and then at best link those video files, via hyperlinks, from your own website. However, some audio files (e.g., songs sung by your children) may be surely kept within your own website (hyper-linked from one of your webpages, as was the case with the PDF files) - the only issue is to keep them in a format (e.g., the .mp3 format) that provides rather manageable file size. Also, the file format should be such that it gets opened (i.e., played) in all or most of the computers (of your worldwide viewers): for that purpose also, .mp3 is a good choice. Many cellphones record audio in the .amr format not recognised in most computers, so such recordings need to be converted (say, to mp3) before keeping them on your website. It is possible also to convert a video file (i.e., its audio part) to an audio format such as mp3.
Note: To upload your video files (free of cost) to YouTube, you need to visit its home page and sign in using just your Google i.e., Gmail account. To cut and save a small part of your large video file, you may use a free video editor such as VideoSpirit Pro.
There are available some free multimedia converters such as the wonderful Mobile Media Converter 1.7.1, downloadable from CNET (I found its associated toolbar to have probably created some problem in my computer, so we needn't install that accessory). As shown in the following illustration, I've converted the evening chirping of a host of birds on a tree near the Guwahati railway station (recorded by my low-end cell-phone as a .amr file), into a .mp3 file Birds_rly_stn_evn.mp3. That file (size ~0.5 MB) is now being hosted here on this website. Not so bad an audio quality obtained by a free converter, isn't it?
Note: If this present page is being viewed with the Google Chrome browser, then that browser itself would directly play the hosted audio file, instead of fully downloading it at first.
Mobile Media Converter Converting a .amr Audio File
Recorded by a Cellphone to the .mp3 Format
There
are some sites (e.g., mp3songurls.com)
that even lets you
upload (free of cost) your genuine mp3 songs (not chirping of birds,
etc.) to their own site, so as to be available to a
wide audience. They'll tell you the URLs (i.e., the Internet addresses)
of your uploaded songs, so that you may create hyperlinks to them
on your own website.
As they can host many such songs from you in their site, you'll not
need to worry about the limitation regarding the maximum total size of
your own website. You'd need to have only the hyperlinks to these
uploaded songs on your own website and these hyperlinks would require a
rather tiny data size (say, 0.2 KB each). The only restriction about
such sites, however, is that your uploaded mp3 files must have the
complete information about the artist (the singer), the album title,
the year of publication, the genre (say, popular music, art music,
traditional music, etc.), the lyrics (at least a few starting lines),
the song's title (if not pre-defined by the publisher, it is the first
few words with which the song is popularly known) and the comments
(name of the lyricist, first singer of the song if different from the
present one, etc.). For any .mp3 audio file, these
information can remain inside the .mp3 file and can be saved within
it - even can be altered and further saved by you. The said hosting
sites
require these information to remain within the audio file (it is
because their users can then search for the songs as per these
information), so if that information was originally
incomplete,
you need to first complete them before uploading the song to their
site.
Something similar happened in my case when I wanted to upload the audio version of a nice and well-known Assamese video Paka Dhanar Maje Maje (actually pronounced Pakaa Dhaanar Maaze Maaze, meaning 'amidst the ripe paddies') - with its old popular Assamese song (composed by Rudra Barua) sung by Manjyotsna Goswami Mahanta and acted by Gayatri Mahanta within the video - to mp3songurls.com. As the original video is by now well established in public domain YouTube - here - seemingly uploaded by the publishers, so there's no copyright problem here. I could successfully convert the .wmv video file (54.7 MB, rather difficult to fully download or view in Assam) into an .mp3 audio file named PakaaDhaanarMaazeMaaze.mp3 (5.74 MB size, note the compulsory absence of space in the filename) using the aforesaid converter, but during this conversion all the album information naturally got lost. Now I had to fill them up from scratch, before uploading. To do that, I first needed to right-click at the .mp3 file, then (within the resulting menu) to click at Properties, then to click at the Summary tab within the resulting mini-window, then further to click at the Advanced button if necessary. This resulted in the following mini-window, where I could fill in the missing details under the Music and the Description headings as shown below (however, one mustn't edit the Track Number entry). After filling in the details, we needed to press Apply, then OK.
Filling in the Required MP3 File Properties Ourselves
The .mp3 file is now ready for uploading. Next, I needed to create an account in mp3songurls.com before uploading - that was rather easy - and then to log in. Immediately after uploading the file, they informed me in the same webpage about the URL of my uploaded song as http://uploads3.mp3songurls.com/1339547.mp3 (yes, they'd rename your mp3 file with a long number only), and using that URL I could create a hyperlink to that song as below:
Something similar happened in my case when I wanted to upload the audio version of a nice and well-known Assamese video Paka Dhanar Maje Maje (actually pronounced Pakaa Dhaanar Maaze Maaze, meaning 'amidst the ripe paddies') - with its old popular Assamese song (composed by Rudra Barua) sung by Manjyotsna Goswami Mahanta and acted by Gayatri Mahanta within the video - to mp3songurls.com. As the original video is by now well established in public domain YouTube - here - seemingly uploaded by the publishers, so there's no copyright problem here. I could successfully convert the .wmv video file (54.7 MB, rather difficult to fully download or view in Assam) into an .mp3 audio file named PakaaDhaanarMaazeMaaze.mp3 (5.74 MB size, note the compulsory absence of space in the filename) using the aforesaid converter, but during this conversion all the album information naturally got lost. Now I had to fill them up from scratch, before uploading. To do that, I first needed to right-click at the .mp3 file, then (within the resulting menu) to click at Properties, then to click at the Summary tab within the resulting mini-window, then further to click at the Advanced button if necessary. This resulted in the following mini-window, where I could fill in the missing details under the Music and the Description headings as shown below (however, one mustn't edit the Track Number entry). After filling in the details, we needed to press Apply, then OK.
Filling in the Required MP3 File Properties Ourselves
The .mp3 file is now ready for uploading. Next, I needed to create an account in mp3songurls.com before uploading - that was rather easy - and then to log in. Immediately after uploading the file, they informed me in the same webpage about the URL of my uploaded song as http://uploads3.mp3songurls.com/1339547.mp3 (yes, they'd rename your mp3 file with a long number only), and using that URL I could create a hyperlink to that song as below:
Click here to play/download (5.74 MB) the
celebrated Assamese song Paka
Dhanar Maje Maje
(It is just the audio version of the popular video by the same name, available on YouTube)
(It is just the audio version of the popular video by the same name, available on YouTube)
.