Educational computer compatiblity issue

[Foodnmusic]

New school year, new school district, all the high school students get new netbooks. All the teachers get MacBooks (and I use Mac at home). District-wide mandate to USE TECHNOLOGY in the classroom.

My issue: I will be teaching orchestra. Most of these orchestra members do not practice and I want to make it easy to require. If everyone had Macs, I could have them record using GarageBand and email me an mp3 of a scale, etc., but they have Audacity, which I think only does OGG/not compatible w/ Mac?

Is there a not-too-complicated solution that will allow students to send me short recordings that I can actually listen to?

 

[plinden]

http://www.vorbis.com/setup_osx/

 

[ChrisA]

.. If everyone had Macs, I could have them record using GarageBand and email me an mp3 of a scale, etc., but they have Audacity, which I think only does OGG/not compatible w/ Mac?...

Two points:

1) Audacity runs fine on Macs and PCs and Linux and Solaris and...... Check out their web site. It's Open Source. You can all use the same software.

2) You don't need to care if you have the same software. They will be giving you an MP3 file. Why do you care which program they use to create the file as long as it can save to a file-type that you can play. The PCs with Audacity can save to WAV or any of many other formats. They can save to MP3 also but I think they'd need an MP3 encoder plug-in (such as Lame, Lame is free) if they do not already have it -- you just need to agree on a file type.

Third point: You can run PC software on your Mac with fusion, parallels, Virtual Box, boot camp or "Wine". Some of those are free.

 

[Aniday]

There's plenty of free software that will export recordings as an mp3.


I hate Audacity, though. I wish it would just be wiped off the face of the internet. It so convoluted it needs a plug in to export things as an mp3. Honestly -_-