Location Based Audio - A Wikipedia Example

While not strictly an example of location based audio, this is exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote last week about "the idea of printing roadtrips and posting a paper copy of a story in a physical location."  Note the QRCode in the lower right corner.  

This is an example from the Jardin des Plantes in Rennes, France.  Note the viewport from which to direct people specifically to the subject of the article.

It appears that vandalism is an issue.  So perhaps, paper copies of stories are more pragmatic.

Imagine your station's reporting placed in prominent areas of your community, where people could gain insight into their neighborhoods and where the value of your reporting could be visibly reinforced.

Public Radio Roadtrip: Request for Beta Testers

I've been coding away on the public radio roadtrip app
http://publicradioroadtrip.appspot.com/publicradioroadtrip/

with some interesting additions:

• Podcast downloads
• ability to sort roadtrips by date or by a user defined "sort value" (1,2,3 / a,b,c / 0.1, 0.2 etc.)
• Ability to view roadtrip in google maps
• Ability to view in Layar mobile app (by way of a "mediarss gateway" which could also be an interesting idea for other pubmedia projects)
• ability to download a printable pdf of roadtrips and individual stories
• display of QRCode scans which link directly to the audio for each story

I'm particularly excited about the idea of printing roadtrips and posting a paper copy of a story in a physical location (as well as providing gpx/kml downloads for use in gps units to promote the use of stories as caches for people interested in geocaching with publicmedia).  I think the idea of printing a flyer containing a QRCode for the url directly to the audio could allow for some interesting possibilities for listeners and stations.  I think this could be a low-tech entry for getting location-based audio out to mobile phones without, at this point, building a dedicated app.

I'd like to experiment with placing flyers about a specific news story out into the physical locations that are relevant to the story and where a person could gain insight into a place by listening to several stories about an issue.

But I'd like to work with some of you to refine this process.  In particular, I'd like to work with content experts on the kinds of stories that would be best grouped into a roadtrip.  I'd like to test and refine displaying these stories and to learn and adapt from these experiences.

I'd like to work with pubmedia coders who are used to working with an app in progress and I'd like to adapt the public radio roadtrip app to these experiences and to post the code for others to use and adapt to best suit theirs, their reporters' and their constituents' needs.

Already, I've incorporated input from Barrett and Patrick on the public media coders list, as well as generous input from colleagues Krissy, Javaun and Andrew into the issue tracker here: http://code.google.com/p/publicradioroadtrip/issues/list .But I think there are ideas, uses and possibilities for this app that have not been discovered yet.

Let me know if you are interested in giving this a try and I'd be glad to work with you.

Feel free to create an account and put your favorite public radio stories on the map!
http://publicradioroadtrip.appspot.com/publicradioroadtrip/

Are there Best Practices for Pubmedia Embedded Audio Players?

Lately, I have been testing different embedded audio players for requests from the NPR API.

I wanted to play the audio when someone clicks on a pin representing a story from NPR.org at a particular place on a map. When this information bubble displays, I wanted the audio to play automatically, like this here:

You can view and try this for yourself at http://publicradioroadtrip.appspot.com/publicradioroadtrip/default/view_collection/364006

(Also, if you want to see/hear something a little more interesting, drag and drop the icon of the person in the top left corner onto the pin on the map. If you click on the pin in street view, you should be able to listen to the story as you are looking around at the landscape).

I was interested in using a flash as a fallback player while also using the html5 audio tag (which I understand will only support mp3 (and wav and ogg... for a full description of the issue of html5 support for audio, see: http://html5doctor.com/native-audio-in-the-browser/ (thanks to my friend Barrett for the heads up)).

I was leaning towards using the flash-based JW Player (because this is already available as a plugin for the framework that I am using and can be cleanly and easily implemented). However, I found that while the JW Player does support a wide variety of playlist formats , it does not support m3u files.

( For the moment, I've opted for using the Open Source Media Framework's Flash Media Playback player which has a handy configuration page here: http://www.osmf.org/configurator/fmp/ )

So I asked the folks at @nprdigitalsvcs if it was possible to specify mp3 as an output format, as opposed to m3u. They swiftly and graciously replied by saying that at present, you can't request just mp3 audio. You can walk through all audio elements and find type=mp3. These mp3 files are specified within an m3u file.

So, my question is, what solutions have you arrived at when placing an embedded audio player on your site? Looking ahead to html5, is there an additional output format that we can suggest that NPR implement which would help people to best build pubmedia audio applications for the next generation of browsers and devices?

Would it be valuable for pubmedia coders to suggest some best practices for embedded audio players when presenting audio by way of the NPR API?