Moodle® For Dummies®

Incorporating Sound files into Your Moodle Course

As with video files, you can upload sound files to your course. Sound files may be useful for a number of teaching activities, such as translations (for a language course in which students are translating content) or pronunciation practice (for an ESL or a foreign language courses). You can also upload recordings of historic speeches, poetry recitation, and music (for interpretation or theory courses). No doubt you can find all kinds of uses for sound files.

The MP3 format is the sound file most compatible with Moodle. You can use any number of different conversion tools (which are usually bundled with newer computers) to create MP3 sound files. The following sound file formats are widely used:

• .mp3 mp
• .aac
• .wma (Windows Media Audio)
• .ra (Real Media)

A good program for creating and converting sound files is Audacity(http://audacity.sourceforge.net), a free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It's available for most operating systems (Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and others). With Audacity, you can record your own lectures, readings, or music and then optimize those files for Moodle and save them in an MP3 format. Audacity also enables you to open other sound file formats and play with them and save them as MP3 files, or you can open an audio file in another format.

Audacity enables you to

• Record live audio.
• Convert tapes and records into digital recordings
• Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV, or AIFF sound ...