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"So How Do I Go about Organizing My Language Learning Tapes?" 

by Dawson Tennant

First appeared: Language Learning #25

A number of weeks ago a friend and I were discussing ways of storing our language learning recordings onto computer. If you ave been reading this newsletter you will have no doubt picked up the idea of massive comprehensible input coming from the minds of folks like Greg Thomson. After taking such advice you either have, or are working on getting a large collection of audio cassette tapes with stories and language learning sessions recorded on them. Now that you have this massive collection of comprehensible input, how do you make use of it? How do you organize it? In this article I hope to get you starting to think about how to organize your language data by giving you an example of what I have done so far. The example I give is by no means exhaustive, nor the only way to organize your data, its purpose is to provide a demonstration which might help you in your language learning.

A. Make your language learning audio data accessible to your computer

In order to organize anything you need to index it according to where it is stored. Using cassette tapes as an example, the little white index card which comes with every blank cassette serves this purpose well ... (kind of). What if you have 50 one-hour cassette tapes and you are interested in concentrating on a subject which is found on four of these (you think)? You can rewind and fast-forward each tape to cue it up to the sections you are interested in and then listen. If you want to listen to the same performance over again you repeat said directions and you are on your way to listening to the same passages again. With trying to synchronize the tape counter for each of the four tapes and find the position on the tape ... yikes, you probably have spent as much time finding the sections of tape as listening to them. Can we organize our tapes in an easier way?

Yes. Enter MP3 (this is an unashamed plug for creating and maintaining MP3 files). If you record all your tapes onto computer in MP3 format (or for that matter do all your recordings on your computer in the first place) and organize your files with an MP3 jukebox such as the free Music Match Jukebox© (MMJB©) (which can be found at http://www.download.com) you will be able to easily find what you need and play your selection back as many times as you please without having to fuss with tape counters and index cards. I should make it known that I am not endorsing MMJB© for any other reason than it is the one which I happened to download off the Internet and I find it works nicely for my purposes.

"But", you protest, "I have at least 100 one-hour cassette tapes to save to my computer... this could take hours." Transferring your files from tape to computer is not a complete waste of time even though it might seem so. You can listen to some of those hours of tapes which you have been neglecting for so long (because you couldn’t find what you wanted) as you record and organize them on your computer.

B. Organize the data on your computer

I have approximately fourteen sixty-minute cassettes worth of audio transferred to my computer now and have really just started organizing these data. Each MP3 file has an identification tag (ID3 tag) which can be edited using your favorite jukebox program, or audio editor like Cool Edit 2000© (again, I am not plugging a product it is just one that I happen to use). 

Ok it is example time. Here is a rough picture of how my language learning MP3 files are organized on my disk (as I type this article I am saving "Phrases Tape 1B" where Hani was my language resource person):

C:/Documents

     MY MP3s

          LL

               FRED

                    Lexicarry: colours, let’s make tea, take a picture ...

                    Misc: emotions, mouse king story

                    Stories: significance of candy canes

               NED

                     MSA Vol II: lessons 33-40

               FRED 2: misc stuff

               SAM

                     Taped story series: Tape 1 side A to Tape 3 side B

                     Taped music: one complete tape of ethnic music

                CHRIS

                     Children’s Stories: Ginger bread man etc

                     MSA Vol I: lessons 1- 20

                HANI: Phrases Tape 1A, Phrases Tape 1B

          MY MUSIC

          MY WIFE'S MUSIC

Notes for the chart:

1. In the above diagram, the capitalized titles are directories and subdirectories, whereas the regular text represents the mp3 files themselves).

2. The names have been changed to maintain anonymity of the people who help me with my language learning.

3. MSA Vol I, and Vol II are two of the three books in a series which introduces a gradually increasing complexity in grammar and vocabulary as the chapters go by.

4. The Lexicarry (Patrick R. Moran, Pro Lingua Associates, Brattleboro, Vt, 1984) is a picture dictionary which was written for people trying to learn English, but it can be used with modification for any language.

5. I have named my files the same way I label my tapes (since I am transferring all my tapes to MP3 format), you may consider using a different file naming convention. Just make it consistent.

I have used my language helpers' names as subdirectories, and the category of material that they have done for me as a further subdirectory. Another suggestion for organization would be to use the category as the main subdirectory and then use different language helper's recordings as subdirectories of the category. 

You could conceivably use data quality, recording date, language information, or a whole host of other information about your recordings as the main subdirectory in a structure similar to what I am proposing. It would be best to chose one which in your mind is a major discriminating factor among your recordings.

C. Organize your ID3 tags

By using MMJB© when I record a new track (MP3 file), each track gets automatically placed into the directory structure as above. Here is how I have it set up (you can make the appropriate changes to correspond with your chosen directory structure). Select the Recorder tab from the Settings selection from the pull-down menu labeled Options. Under "Directory for new songs" type C:DocumentsMP3s. Under the heading "Make Subpath Using", check the boxes to the left of the following: artist, and album. Check the box beside "Track Name" under the heading "Name song file using". The only additional thing you need to do is change the information contained under Album, Artist, and Edit Track Name by clicking on the information and typing over it with the information you want. For example, if I were about to record a new chapter from the MSA Vol II, let's say chapter 60. I would type the information in the following boxes before recording that track:

Album: MSA Vol II

Artist: Ned

Edit Track Name: Lesson 60.

The directory is automatically generated by the program if it did not exist prior to you recording the audio data. If you use another program to record MP3 files, or you obtain MP3 files in another way, you need to add these files to your "music database". This is done in MMJB© by selecting "Show Music Library" from the "Options – View" pull-down menu. Within the "Music Library" section of the player, choose “Add” and find the MP3 files you want to add to your music library. If the Artist, Album, and Song Name fields are blank (the ID3 tag data has not been filled in), then your "song" will be placed in a miscellaneous "Album". If you edit the ID3 tags by selecting the given :"Song" and selecting "Tag", then you can correctly label your "songs" in the Music Library. 

After having recorded and stored your mp3 files in some semblance of order you then should edit the ID3 tags for each mp3 file in order to be able to locate and use your data quickly and easily in your "music library". Most of this information (see table 1) is stored exclusively in your "music library" database, while the Song (track), Artist (language resource person), and Album (category name) are stored with the actual MP3 file. 

Table 1 indicates the type of information which can be stored in the MMJB© music library. The second column contains my suggestion for interpreting this information for language learning purposes. The final column indicates what type of data, or the amount of data stored for each data field. 

TABLE 1:

Suggested interpretations for language learning using a music library database.

I have starred Genre, Tempo, Mood, Situation, and Preference in table 1 because to really take advantage of these data, you need to modify the choices available from the factory. Since this program was intended for musical purposes, it doesn’t provide the language learner enough options to accurately classify their data.

I now submit some suggestions for extending the utility of these pull-down menus for us language learners. For the Language earning Genre (Genre) which normally contains options such as: Blues, Death Metal, Rap ..., etc., I have added TPR (Total Physical Response), Vocabulary, Series Method, Word List, Story, Dialogue Practice, Mimicry, Printed Literature, Radio Drama, and News Broadcast. The other extensions I submit in table 2 below:

Table 2, Suggested music library database extensions:

Note: ALLR and ILR in column one refer to two different language proficiency scales. One could also use the four stages which Greg Thomson discusses in his articles, or any other one for that matter.

To add these extensions or any others which you deem useful for your purposes you need to edit (using Notepad, or some other text editor) the DbParams.ini file likely located at C: FilesMatch. This file is simply a list of options available for the pull-down menus described earlier. For each pull down menu there is a title in brackets and on the line following is the count. You add a new option by simply typing a new number followed by the equals sign and the category name. After adding your new options you must change the count number for that list to include the selections you have added. Since the count starts at zero, you need to add one to the last number in the list you are modifying and change the count number for that list to this new number. For instance if you wanted to add the option "Spurious" to the Data Quality (Preference) section, the chart following shows what the before and after editing section of the files would look like (italics indicates the changes):

Most MP3 jukebox programs allow you to fill up your "play tray" with songs of your choice according to Genre, Preference, Artist, Tempo, and so on (or in the case for language learning folks: Genre, Data Quality, Tutor, Skill Level, ...). If you have organized the MP3 cataloguing information for your entire music library (all your MP3 data) you will be able to quickly select the recording(s) of your choice according to the information you have included in your Music Library. Gone are the woes of fast-forwarding and re-winding to cue up your audio files! And repeating any or all of the choices is dead easy. (Try to equal the ease and convenience of using MP3 files and tools with using tape recorders and tapes!)

D. Back up and share your data

Now that you have done all the necessary massaging to your MP3 files, and their associated ID3 tags using an MP3 librarian program, you should remember to back up your valuable data. Here is another nice feature of audio stored on computer files--it’s very easy and fast to make back-ups as compared to doing the same with audio tapes. Along the same lines, it becomes simple and practical to share your MP3 files with other fellow language learners who are learning the same language. If you get a group of language learners together you can multiply your efforts of your language resource sharing!

E. Conclusion

I've taken you on a tour of how to take your comprehensible input and other language learning tapes and store them on your computer. Next, I suggested ways to organize your files and their associated "music library" tags. Along the way I stopped to show you how I have done it with my data. I demonstrated an example of how to organize your file structure and then how to organize your “language learning library” using an MP3 jukebox player program. I discussed a way to customize the data that you include in that library using MMJB©. Finally I touched on backing up and sharing your data with other language learners. 

The examples given in this article are by no means the only way, nor even the best way to organize your language learning MP3 data, I submit them to you as examples to help you in your language learning and to stimulate your thinking. Some of you thinkers out there are bound to come up with some other ideas. Share them with the rest of us!

Happy MP3ing!

Dawson Tennant

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