Matt Bury

I'm a Flash developer. If you can point me at where I can find the source code, I can check that out. I expect it was made using Flash MX (6) and its MP3 handling isn't as tolerant as later versions and you have to do a lot of error handling to make it more stable.

It's also not too good with non-standard MP3 files. If you check out the 'advanced' method of creating MP3 files on moodle docs, they explain it quite well there. Basically you have to make sure that the audio WAV was recorded at 44.1 khz (sampling rate, not bitrate).

If you can find a good CODEC to recode your MP3 files you can iron out all these reliability 'wrinkles'. It's not really applicable in this case, but Flash can't handle MP3 bitrates higher than 128 kbps.

And yeah, if you can't do it in Flash, there are plenty of other options: Quicktime, Windows Media Player and RealPlayer but RealPlayer is less common than the others.

Why are you embedding 150 audio players on a page at once? Do you really want to listen to 150 MP3s played at once? Just embed one player that plays all the MP3 files. Flash can handle 32 sound channels simultaneously which I think would be enough for anyone.

If you want to get around the click to activate EOLA in IE, check SWFObject. You can find it easily in Google. It's open source and just about everyone who works with Flash uses it. Flash CS3 even comes with its own version linked in to the published HTML page.

I don't think Moodle would really be much use for teaching pronunciation. To do this kind of thing with computers you've got 2 options:

#1 use a 3rd party programme on the users' computer - Tell Me More and Talk to Me from Auralog are excellent for pronunciation practice. They both record the students' pronunciation for them to listen to and compare the students' voices to the original recordings. The end result is pretty convincing. They also offer subscription services on the www.

#2 Skype is currently running a Beta pay-as-you go service where you can set yourself up as a consultant and charge callers by the minute at a rate set by you. It's free to set up and when I tried it out I started getting calls almost immediately. There are some very strict rules attached to using it though. I think this is probably the most satisfactory way of charging for Internet 1 to 1 teaching, otherwise you can get into all sorts of issues when connections are broken or unreliable!

Hi,

I'm an experienced Flash Designer and ActionScript developer but completely new to Moodle.

I've read a few of the threads here and read through and tried the tutorials that I could find. Ok, so here's my problem:

I'm embedding my SWF with the suggested tags:

<object width="600" height="400" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
 codebase=
 "http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0">
 <param name="movie" value="http://yoursite.org/file.php/2/movie.swf" />
 <param name="quality" value="high" /> <embed width="600" height="400"
 src="http://yoursite.org/file.php/2/movie.swf" quality="high"
 type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
 pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" /></object>

When I preview or view from a student account, the page where I've embedded my SWF file, I get this text showing up where the SWF should be:

codebase=
"http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0">
src="http://www.watchtvlearnenglish.com/test_bed/fl_cube.swf" quality="high"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />

I've tried setting - Modules > Filters > Multimedia Plugins > Show > Settings > Enable .swf filter "Yes", to no avail.

Please help!

P.S. I'm using Flash CS3 Professional with ActionScript 3.0, although I doubt that this would have anything to do with what's going on here.